However much you think it costs to lay new fiber, add three zeroes. If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses. You then have to pay for the construction and any remediations the property owner demands. Typically you have to put the land back to exactly how you found it.
This is the entire reason that the US forced Bell/AT&T to allow any company to lease a connection to their network. Without that, it would have been flatly impossible for any new provider to compete. There is simply no way that anyone could have ever built out a network to compete with Bell.
You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
Your only recourse there is to additionally stand up DSL/DOCSIS as a 'last mile' connection between the customer and your fiber. At additional unbelievable expense.
> If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses.
This may be true in some areas, but it wasn't in mine. I didn't have to agree to anything; it was negotiated with the town, not me. I presume they used the existing utility/sewer easements.
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.
If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
You can get on the poles, if they're there and there's room, and you can find and follow the attachment rules and pay the attachment prices. Back when Google was going to run fiber to the home, they couldn't figure out how to manage the rules, which made their deployments very slow and eventually they gave up when AT&T (and others) deployed fiber to the communities Google announced before Google had managed to get plans finished.
They probably should have found a small telco or three to buy for expertise on pole bureaucracy.
Responding to your parent...
> You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
I would assume mandatory line sharing doesn't apply; the FCC walked back almost all of the 1996 Telecom Act line sharing; telcos and cablecos may well have designed their fiber to the home in ways to thwart what limited regulation was present anyway. If you're near 'commercial' fiber though, lots of that is available for lease.