Some have no concept of value, so costs loom irrationally large, but it’s really not that big a deal.
As last night’s 730 piece suggested, most of our problems stem from trying to do the job cheap and quick. This is major infrastructure. Cheap & quick (and perhaps cheap or quick) will inevitably slow us down and end up costing a great deal more than it should.
What we need is a bit of Cathedral Thinking. The anticipated service life of optical fibre is a century or more, so that’s the scale on which we need to plan. The fact that the current generation seems inadequate to the task disgraces those who went before us, building first the Overland Telegraph and then the copper 'phone network.
