I’m sure the fiber optic cables are at least as safe as the plastic/wood/lead water pipes.

They'll be in another sleeve.

We've been putting cables underwater for over a century now. We can already do it in cold, and extremely deep seawater too. I think it'll be fine.

I'd love to see this technique become widespread. It's so sad that even in the >1 million person city where I live there still neighbourhoods without fibre-to-the-premises in <current year>.

You don't drink that water.

I think Google's joke solution of using sewage (or perhaps storm sewer pipes) would solve that issue, then.

The city replaced water mains near my house a couple of years ago that were made of asbestos impregnated concrete. I think the replacements were PVC, so I'm sure they could wrap the cable with something similar. The whole thing sounds kind of 1995, though.

They just run a conduit inside the water pipe, probably the same thing the pipe is made of, likely PVC.

This seems like the only sensible answer here. Yeah, I hope so. Do you know how they might replace sections of the pipe in the future if they need to? Seems like it'd become quite an ordeal compared to normal pipe replacement. Not to mention the absurdity of people losing internet when a water pipe bursts!

The cables are mostly glass fibre, and glass is about as good as you can get in terms of being safe with water. There are obviously coatings too, and for water deployments the coatings will be chosen to be safe to "drink" in case of any abrasion or wear.

What I don't get is why nobody here is accounting for harsher realities than "pure water flowing in a pipe at a normal temperature". To give two examples, what happens if the pipe bursts at some point? Or needs to be replaced for whatever reason? If the fibers don't get torn at that point, you can still end up with sediment in the pipe. Wouldn't that potentially damage the fibers downstream? Would people potentially end up drinking bits of glass? I could go on but it surprises me few people here are discussing the things that could go wrong.

Because it's wishful thinking along the lines of 'oh, great, internet out of my tap, why didn't I think of that'. This is a problem with many technologies that would be great to have but that are a lot harder than they seem to be at first glance, for instance VAWTs have been soaking up funding for many decades now and will continue to do so without ever giving a proper ROI because it seems to be such a great idea that every couple of years it goes through a revival.

The cables are not 'mostly glass fibre' they are a tube within another tube and then the standard fibre optic cable is blown through that inner tube like it normally would be, otherwise the whole thing will be utterly unreliable to the point that it will be broken before your trial properly begins.

That said all of the other complexity remains.