> I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations,
It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.
I'm starting to get interested in wiring my neighborhood (the best current option is 6mb during the day and ~0.5mb in the evenings.) Are there any resources you could send me on what it would take to wire up a small area?
I could talk about this for hours... But really, it's quite a bit of work and really specific to your area. Since you're looking to do a small area, you probably won't have enough capital to bury fiber which is a shame because that's when you start getting the biggest bang for the buck. There's a couple different angles you need to assess.
Politics/Bureaucrats -- what laws are in place to prevent you from deploying in X fashion? Can you bury fiber? Do you have to string across utility poles? If so, who owns the poles? (It'll either be the city or a utility company) What are their rates? What are the requirements to get quotes for their rates? (CenturyLink requires you to be a part of an NDA/Non-Compete Agreement program if you are reselling competitive services)
Business -- how many people are you looking to service? What's the absolute max you could potentially service? (usually subdivisions are zoned with a specific max amount of households) How many would you like to service? What is an acceptable cost? (I found $100 is the sweet spot for gigabit fiber) What kind of customers will you be servicing? (mostly soccor moms who will browse the internet from 11a-3p, young families who embrace video streaming from 8p-11p, retirees who only care about email and facebook from 9a-12p, etc.)
Technical -- how much bandwidth do you really need? Chances are you can actually service 100 or so residential customers with just a single gigabit ethernet connection. How much fiber will you need to run to everyone? The easiest thing to do is run single-mode fiber connected to a media converter in their house. Depending on how you can do "huts" (as google has dubbed them) you will probably do single cisco ToR switch with 48 spf+ ports for 40 customers. You will dedicate 4 ports for uplink connectivity via LACP and have 4 stand-by ports should one be bad. Scale this out as needed.
This will also be specific to your area -- but expect $10k/mile to run conduit to a hut with an additional $2k/mile for different fiber pulls. You would usually run conduit and some kind of fiber at the same time -- probably 96 strand single-mode. But that's up to you.
Not sure what else you need to know. That should be a good starting ground. The bulk of our capital was for fluid insurance bonds. About 80% of our working capital was going to be tied into those while we laid the fiber.
> I suspect I'm going to have to do copper on poles to make it viable, but how do I find out who owns the poles and what they charge?
That's where a lot of leg work comes in. You'll have to start asking the city who owns them. I started by emailing the first person who sounded like they had the title of "secretary". It took about 5 emails getting batted around before I found out.
> Also I don't have any idea how to go about purchasing upstream bandwidth - any advice there?
Again, this is the leg work on your part. Do all the research you can and figure out who has fiber running nearby. You're going to have to tap into that for service. If it's the provider you go with who owns it then you won't have a seperate dark fiber leasing cost. CenturyLink, AT&T, XO, TW Telecom, Layer3, Qwest (many of these have merged together, but they sometimes use older names when referring to circuits -- so a qwest circuit might be running nearby but you'd go through centurylink to get it) will all be more than happy to take your money, but most of the backbone providers probably won't return your phone calls if you're not talking about 100G connections.
It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.