NickCoons - 3:09 am on Jun 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

BillyS,

I'm not disagreeing with your argument that Google might have difficulty recovering their costs, but I do think your numbers are way off:

Let's see, they probably spent around $2,000 per node (on the CHEAP side) - that's $700,000 in capital.

I've done quite a bit of wireless installations, even ones that cover large areas (though not metro-sized yet). I would say that $200 would be closer to the cheap side, and $2,000 would be more on the "oh my god how could you possibly spend that much on a node" side.

350 - T1 lines at $150 / month = $52,500 / month

Are you suggesting that they run a T1 line to each node? Why would they do that? Systems like this usually have bandwidth at a central location, or spread out across a few locations. The nodes then communicate with each other to share bandwidth. It's likely that they have a few fiber lines feeding a or a couple nodes that all get bandwidth from the same place. Their cost this bandwidth is probably much closer to $5,000/month than to $52,500/month (depending on the speeds they're offering).