Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.

It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.

Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.

A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground, unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company to manage it.

Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).

Yep, depending on the lay of the land doing the grunt work can save thousands or tens of thousands - if you have the company do it they'll almost certainly bring in a crew of 4 or 5 with a underground "hog" machine that's supposed to work perfectly but doesn't actually so the backhoe appears and then they cut into a buried utility line that was marked but backhoes can't read and then you wait for the power company to come out and then they fight over whose fault it was while the freezer slowly drips onto your floor.

Or you can rent a ditch witch and do it yourself and dig by hand near anything remotely marked by the marking crew.

lol sounds like this might not just be a hypothetical scenario for you.

I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.

I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)

Well, you'd probably start by getting Miss Utility to come out and mark your lines. I think bombcar's point was that you care a lot more about not cutting those than any contractor will, and so you're less likely to do it.