A lot of the cost is pulling wires, but the equipment on both sides is also a major expense. FiOS scaled up from 75 mbps to 1 gbps over the same passive infrastructure, but the cost of upgrades was substantial. BPON line cards were upgraded to GPON linecards, and an upgrade to NGPON2 is in the works. As bandwidth went up, the number of customers per line card had to go down. 1G router ports had to be upgraded to 10G router ports. Etc.

I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node. In a municipal system, that's all infrastructure that the government has to pay to upgrade.

> I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node

Most carrier equipment operates below layer 3, and so is invisible to traceroute. But since you referenced it:

    traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  192.189.29.1 (192.189.29.1)  4.120 ms  4.267 ms  4.427 ms
     2  172.17.1.85 (172.17.1.85)  4.021 ms  4.077 ms  4.100 ms
     3  h252.63.131.40.static.ip.windstream.net (40.131.63.252)  10.661 ms  10.613 ms  10.600 ms

Why would it cost the government more to do that than Verizon?

Half joking: is it because the government gave Verizon billions of dollars?

Exactly. We're getting municipal 10 gigabit in my town currently. I can't see myself being unsatisfied with 10 gigabit fiber for a long long time.

But I have read that some researcher pushed consumer fiber optic to over 1tbps. So even when every wall of your house will be streaming 8k video 24/7, you might not reach the limit of the pipe.

“almost unlimited” doesn’t mean anything.