I'm ok with the network, a little concerned with how they stretch things in the law to do things which may be ok but questionably within the scope of the law. This law was designed to connect rural health care facilities to larger ones to support thing like telemedicine which requires large image files and hi res video conference. But they add schools by saying there is a nurse there. Yes but there is one at my mom's house more that the one is at school, and no fiber drop there. And at those schools there is no ct, MRI video endpoints etc to tie to it.
These are not supposed to be internet connection transport, but telemedicine infrastructure. I suspect they will be used for more mundane uses than the advanced technology the law was intended to provide.
I'm for free market but when they fail as they have for the most part in relation to high speed internet, then am ok with Muni provided networks.
In this network case I think they could have built it for it's intended purpose and sold iru's to over build and lower the overall costs. I suspect even you would have been interested in a selection of dark pairs for an appropriate equity investment.
It's just crazy not having municipalities, pseudo public entities, private companies and anyone else share capx and opx in a robust networks that can benefit the most. But no everyone trenches, bores, engineers, coordinates their own and that is just crazy.
I bought fiber irus for dark and wavelengths on multiple subsea cables for bandwidth and distances thousands of times larger for less money than you would pay to build a network like these. It's time to build them so their cost can be amortized across more than just the taxpayers.