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I think you are exaggerating a bit. I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor. I pay $480 a year for Comcast, my neighbor gets CenturyLink.

So the cost for the pole rental works out to about 5% of Comcast's service cost to me.

Keep in mind some poles cost more than others (up to $250 according to the report), and that there are also hookup costs for the pole are ~$1000.

I'm not saying ISPs are suffering here, but cities are not providing this infrastructure at a loss.




> I have a pole in front of my house that just serves me and my neighbor

Hah. We live in veeeeery different housing densities I guess. I was thinking this was NYC, which would be closer to mine. If it's the whole state then probably somewhere in between.


Some reasonable sources [0] put the number of telephone poles in the US (175m) a little above the number of households (125m).

[0] https://www.srperspective.com/post/telephone-poles-a-high-wi...


Check out this fun map curtesy of NYC who do a pretty good job exposing a lot of these type of data https://maps.nyc.gov/sandbox/poletop-finder/




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