If you think "5G" will replace medium and long haul DWDM fiber networks, as a backbone, you have some very great misperceptions about what real internet infrastructure looks like.
I never said that, I don't think you really understand how 5G works. The big 3 cloud already have extensive experience in creating DWDM fiber network as backbone, it's not really all that different from internet stack anymore.
But none of them have their own ROW to do it, except around small specific regional campuses like Hillsboro. They have dark fiber leases, IRUs, and wavelength circuits. Show me a big FAANG owned and controlled cable from western OR or WA to Colorado, for instance. Doesn't exist. Show me a FAANG owned and controlled path from Hillsboro to Sacramento and the bay area. Doesn't exist. They have IRUs in infrastructure built by someone else (Zayo, level3).
Show me one FAANG with anything even 5% of the outside plant wholly contolled fiber route miles of the size and scope of the railway ROW sprint, qwest and level3 networks. Or legacy wiltel.
The only real exception, Google has successfully made a big deal of itself in submarine fiber by throwing its money and weight around.
Of course they don't do it at the scale old telecos are doing it, doesn't mean they are completely new to this kind of thing. Doesn't really take a genius to do this anymore. AWS directly invests in third party companies to lay out intercontinental dark fiber for them, wouldn't take them much to do it themselves if they want to do it on the scale of a teleco, it just isn't a good financial decision to do so at the moment, not a lack of technical expertise.
You are just deflecting the main point of the argument now. Companies like Jio have already proven that all you need is to throw money at this problem and it can be solved. You just need to make sure that the money you invested can be earned back.
With all due respect I sincerely doubt you have ever had the equivalent of "enable" or "configure" access on the core routers of any significant ISP. Not anything in the top 1500 worldwide by CAIDA ASrank size and customer AS, peer AS measurement scale.
Using jio as an example of "why don't the faangs just build their own massive ISPs at OSI layer 1 by throwing money at it" is so dreadfully wrong and misinformed I won't even dignify it with a further response.
