There are pieces of conduit that we run fiber through into your building. Inside your building there's a fiber termination point that hands off to ethernet. On the other end is a repeater/node that boosts the signal from the other termination point back in the DC.
For a city like San Francisco, only a fraction of what is in the ground is mapped. The only reasonable option is many places is to dig up the ground and look at what you're working with.
Even in the area I live in, ripping up the streets is how it's done. I've only seen horizontal boring machines deployed a few times around here. Maybe they're used a lot and I don't notice them because I don't have to drive around them, but I do keep a eye open for them in the wild. I considered renting or buying one for a project and was impressed how cheap they are, but the benefit of burying things versus the price - no contest.
What I learned, though, is there are eBay-like markets for TBMs and it seems most people buy one with so many hours on it, use it for a project, and sell it +so many hours. I didn't find the thriving rental market I expected.
I can confirm that horizontal boring machines have never been used in any telco digging opportunity I've been a part of :/. I wish it were the case but it is all tear-up-the-streets territory.
No, and AFAIK, in Austin all the early roll outs were in older neighborhoods with physical poles. I'm not sure if google was lashing their cables to existing lines, but I saw TWC doing that a lot when they were splitting nodes here. It was amazingly fast they would show up with a truck and lash a half mile of cable in a couple hours.
Of course one of the early slowdowns was AT&T throwing a fit about google sharing poles owned by AT&T.
1) pole rights matter. In San Francisco, att also owns the poles and does everything they can to prevent other people from using them. I would tell installs that it would be 30 days from the day we got permitted until the circuit was installed, but that despite there being a 30-day limit on replies for pole permits, many times att would wait 180 days before issuing access permits. It was honestly a joke around the office.
2) many cities do not have above-ground power and fewer still have above-ground telco without power. I have not researched this extensively so I am not sure if google picked places with poles specifically, but that would be a smart move. That being said, imagining att would let them use the poles was not really reasonable.
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