That's great, but time value of money being what it is, you'd rather pay for something later than paying for it now. One of the factors Google used in choosing Fiber cities was whether the city has arial power lines versus buried ones. Requiring cable burial is just another one of the many anti-development measures that keeps places like Silicon Valley from having fiber when far less wealthy places have it.

My neighborhood, in a part of Maryland where I can get to horse farms in five minutes, has fiber. It didn't even have public water/sewer until two years ago, but it had fiber. Tiny, non-to-code lots, arial power lines, and easy-going permitting authorities played a role in making fiber deployment feasible.

> That's great, but time value of money being what it is, you'd rather pay for something later than paying for it now.

That assumption only holds if the cost of the inputs do not rise with time. In fiber builds up to 80% of the costs are labor. If/when labor costs rise more than the cost of money then you are worse off putting off an inevitable/intended investment.

Furthermore if putting off an investment causes duplicate costs (build aerial, later replace with buried) or causes you to forego OPEX savings (aerial vs. buried facilities maintenance costs), then you are actually worse off by paying later.

Thus the time value of money is not the end all and be all.

It isn't anti-development if the net present value is positive. Whether that's true obviously depends on the time value of money, i.e. interest rates, but interest rates are still near historic lows. So if there was ever a time to do it.