How much does LinkNYC cost?

So how much will it actually cost, which numbers should we be looking at?

To get an idea, Mayor Bloomberg spent about six years studying the project's potential cost.2 million cost estimate per mile is the minimum that could feasibly be built for each block, including underground utilities, and is the price the city would prefer for a full build out of the entire 8 miles. LinkNYC is hoping to finance all of this, but if they fail, the New York Public Service Commission can compel the company to fully cover these costs. I don't remember reading anything about LinkNYC suggesting they're going to use millions of dollars worth of fiber posts per square mile.7M each mile, etc. This is a really weird number for two reasons:

It's probably not realistic for such a small amount of land.7M for every single house in Manhattan (a pretty tall order), they'd probably need more than a few hundred square miles to be able to afford it.

It's completely unnecessary. LinkNYC would have access to this massive fiber optic infrastructure without spending one single dollar, since it's built underground and just waiting for a switch. (There are a total of 17,944 streetlights currently in NYC.

Who owns LinkNYC?

What will the streetcar look like?

Can it work? The first question is more pertinent than the second, so for the purpose of this talk we're going to ignore the last one. So the first question has the answer I wish everyone would answer: Google.

There's something in the air. Last week Google decided to buy its own cable TV company, but with this acquisition they're not buying an existing business model and service; instead they're taking something that Google has no experience with high-speed fiber internet for a large number of homes and they're building it themselves.

So here's the catch. Google has never been responsible for an enterprise-grade service; instead they make an awful lot of money selling advertising. Why is that good for the Internet? Well, because we don't have many alternatives for getting people to pay for Internet access. If we could all pay our ISP for something other than free email, web pages, and online videos, we might finally be able to build some critical mass.

So we don't have a ton of alternatives right now, which is good for Google. There are lots of things we don't have alternatives for, and many of them are also good investments for the companies offering the services. However, just because Google can afford to spend a billion dollars in the hope of establishing their own infrastructure doesn't mean we need to follow their lead.

How would Google make their service good enough for most users? Maybe offer it at a cost to Google. So what we really have is Google as a business and we need to hold it accountable to a fiduciary duty to the shareholders that they're a public company, which is only part of how public corporations are run. There's a lot of debate about how much you're willing to hold a corporation accountable to its shareholders, and the shareholder argument is powerful, but it's hard to get behind when you realize that a large share of Google's business is simply driving you around in the car.