FTEP

I’m fortunate to get to jog down roads like this regularly. The US countryside is covered with old power poles holding ~13.8KV power lines going to farms. It always makes me wonder why it is that we can’t have fiber to every premise (FTEP).

During the last century the utilities managed to not only install power feeds to every farm in the country, but to meter at the service entrance and charge the customer for only the energy they used. Even with state regulation of profits (local utilities were a monopoly), the utilities managed to grow into successful public businesses.

So why is it that the utilities were able to profitably install power to every premise in the country but communications companies can barely install fiber into high density neighborhoods?