A Realistic Estimate for Building a 100Mbps Nation

[Commentary] How much would it cost to bring fiber to every home in the US? Well, OK, not every home -- some homes are just too remote to justify pulling fiber to them. Areas with less than one home per square mile represent 27% of the land mass in the US; areas with one to five homes per square mile cover another 23%. If an area has less than five homes per square mile, they're probably not going to be able to support a fiber network. If you combine these two together you end up taking 50% of America's area off the table from having to worry about wiring with fiber to the home. Yet that combined area only contains 2% of America's population. One benefit of doing this is that you've now doubled the overall density of the rest of America, which puts us more on par with other nations whose higher density has often been credited as giving them an advantage over the challenges America faces in getting itself wired. Using cost estimates for deploying fiber to different types of communities from Verizon, Hiawatha Broadband, and Jaguar Communications we come up with an overall estimate of $206 billion to bring fiber to 98% of Americans.