Urban Fiber by HOA? Not a service, just the lines

Hi folks.

We have a community of about 500 town-homes in an urban area in Orange Coutny (google fiber does service a city nearby). We only briefly discussed installing our own fiber lines (using a contractor) and wanted to flesh out the idea a bit more.

Estimates I have seen vary wildly. But since all the community is owned by the HOA I think this is at least possible and is worth investigating.

I wanted to ask a few questions and maybe get some feedback of stuff I am not thinking of...

• If we run the lines could we get Google, Verizon, etc to possibly tell us where to connect at to provide service? We do not want to run our own service, just lay the lines and try to negotiate a good price with one of the telecoms.

• How can we estimate lines? Just looking at some rough numbers on google maps, I estimated about 4 miles underground. I doubled up a lot just to make it worse. Reality its about 30-50% less distance. I saw some underground costs and unit cost that put us around $800,000 to $1,200,000. Does this seem ballpark reasonable or am I grossly under estimating.

• If we got a FIOS company to do this. We would also want them to maintain the lines while they are serving the community. Is that realistic, or do we need to do this ourselves? What sort of maintenance would we be looking at for these lines?

• Are there any other communities that have done stuff like this? I would like to read about it!

• Does trying to negotiate better pricing since we are running our own lines sound logical?

• What aren't we thinking of that we need to be?