I am rural and utterly tired of Comcast and still not having the mid-split. Regardless, it still wouldn’t be fast enough for me. They’re playing games with our township by not acknowledging that a new franchise agreement needs to be written up and/or signed (been going on for like a year). When I drive around the area I’m always looking at the lines running between poles. One day I noticed one of those round fiber splice enclosures on a numbered route about 5 miles from my home. I followed it and lo and behold it feeds the local cell tower. The line keeps coming towards my home to an intersection maybe a half mile away. I’m thinking this is some obscure company that leases out dark fibers to people. How do I find out who owns the lines? If I did find out, and that’s their game, how would one connect to the internet via dark fiber?
The short and realistic answer is you don’t.
The long highly unlikely answer: you can do anything if you have enough money. Before spectrum came to my rural area the nearest cable/fiber node was about 10 miles and 2 roads away for a commercial customer, the sales rep said I had have to pay out of pocket to run a line from the node to my house( this was before a state program to run fiber across rural areas was enacted) his off the top of his head estimate was around $60,000 iirc. It was not specified if new poles would have to be erected or if line was going to be buried, they weren’t interested in doing the work for 1 residential customer and I wasn’t interested in paying anywhere near that amount.
That wasn’t just a fuck-off number. Building out infrastructure is expensive. Line crews, police details, permits, lease fees, improvements fees, etc… 60k for 10 miles actually sounds reasonable compared to some of the prices I’ve seen.
$60k for 10 miles is super cheap unless you owned all the land between. I was quoted $15k to run an additional copper line so I could have bonded DSL a quarter of a mile up my driveway.