Industry perspective here. I work for an ISP that does gigabit class last mile residential access. Google gave up because they couldn't make the ROI numbers work. I doubt whether it was ever intended to be economically viable. It was a PR stunt.
You simply can't promise gigabit class last mile service to every residence in a city, and actually build it with a reasonable dollar-per-house cost, and make a return on investment on it. Not unless you have an incredibly low cost to deploy it, basically a city and local electrical utility that has handed you ROW (right-of-way) on a silver platter. Or unless you are already the incumbent telecom operator, and have ROW literally everywhere, and can overbuild your POTS network with modern GPON stuff, as Centurylink is doing in parts of Seattle.
Or unless you bring the dollars-per-unit cost way down, by focusing on MDU (multiple dwelling unit) such as WaveG and Webpass have done.
It costs a lot less to light up an 85 suite condo building with 1000BaseT to each suite, than it does to build last mile GPON or active ethernet fiber to 85 individual houses.
If you have to borrow money, it's expensive. If you just have the money sitting in your treasury, it's a lot more viable.
I never saw the Google Fiber cancellation as a cost issue. It felt to me like more of a scale issue. You have to live in Kansas City to pay Google for fiber, but you can buy an Android device from anywhere in the world. Thus, one of those things is going to make more money than the other, and it makes sense to focus on that.
The economics of ISPs, the way I see it, depend on:
1) Cost of money. (Free if you're Google, 18% a year if you're some guy using your credit card.)
2) Expected lifetime of wireline Internet. Wireless internet isn't getting _worse_ every year. While a lot of us here won't be giving up our wired connections any time soon, many people already have. Their phone is their computer. They can't even plug an Ethernet cable into it if they want to.
If your fiber is going to be good for 50 years... after you've paid off the loan, it costs basically nothing to provide Internet service over. And yet, people will pay more than $0/month to have Internet service. So economically it works out... if fiber continues to be relevant. That is the if that scares people. (The other issue is that it's hard to find free money unless you are, say, Google.)
As for #2, I don't see high speed residential broadband (fixed line, whether VDSL2/g.fast, DOCSIS3.0/3.1, or fiber based) going away any time soon in the North American market.
In developing nation environments where there is no pre-existing wireline infrastructure, and incomes are much more limited, it's now incredibly common for people to only have a phone with LTE radio in it, and no fixed internet at home. Examples would be in Rawalpindi, Pakistan or in small cities in Turkey.
But I don't see people downloading 90GB xbox one games on LTE last mile connections any time soon, even with carriers' advancements in fixed LTE and coming "5G" stuff. The capacity of last mile wired connections will always be much greater. And the typical residential consumer in the US or Canada has much more ability to pay a $75 monthly recurring bill for proper home broadband, on top of their cellphone costs.
Lincoln, NE is near 99% aerial ftth. The economics for aerial pole/strand based ftth are very different than if you need to start trenching, boring, directional drilling and doing things underground.
You simply can't promise gigabit class last mile service to every residence in a city, and actually build it with a reasonable dollar-per-house cost, and make a return on investment on it. Not unless you have an incredibly low cost to deploy it, basically a city and local electrical utility that has handed you ROW (right-of-way) on a silver platter. Or unless you are already the incumbent telecom operator, and have ROW literally everywhere, and can overbuild your POTS network with modern GPON stuff, as Centurylink is doing in parts of Seattle.
Or unless you bring the dollars-per-unit cost way down, by focusing on MDU (multiple dwelling unit) such as WaveG and Webpass have done.
It costs a lot less to light up an 85 suite condo building with 1000BaseT to each suite, than it does to build last mile GPON or active ethernet fiber to 85 individual houses.