Google would have to spend $400B to roll out its fiber nationally, totally worth it

Seth Weintraub | Jul 30 2012 - 9:03 am PT

Capstone Investments‘s Rory Maher this morning had some reflections in the wake of Google’s announcement last Thursday that it plans to offer free Internet service in some parts of the U.S. and paid packages with access up to a gigabit per second.

Writes Maher, it looks like Google is planning nationwide availability given an ad the company has put up for a sales person to sell the service to businesses on a nationwide basis. Maher thinks building a network coast to coast would be too expensive, so probably Google would seek to “barter” fiber: “We believe in most markets Google will likely build in outlying areas where fiber capacity is limited and barter with other fiber providers to build the capacity to serve an entire market. We believe this could cut construction costs significantly.”

BI noted that this would cost nearly $400 billion—significantly ahead of Google’s war chest allotment.

Whatever Google needs to do to make this happen is totally worth it. I have taken to looking at Zillow’s Kansas City pages, noting the $1,000’s plus charge for Gigabit in NYC would quickly offset the cost. Does anyone know how good the pizza is in Kansas City?