Meanwhile in Cumbria, the villagers of Alston are banding together to lay their very own fibre network.
David Cullen is a telecoms veteran and founder of NYnet which runs a fibre network in Yorkshire.
BBC: When will UK rural areas get fast-speed fibre internet?
In tests in Massachusetts its fibre network has run as fast as 10, 000 megabits per second, and it could go faster.
Companies who are building their own managed intranets, such as Delta Three and Qwest, with its ultra-high capacity fibre network, will avoid congestion.
The company is planning a low-latency fibre network that will be capable of delivering speeds of over 100 megabytes a second for communities of 50, 000-500, 000 people.
ECONOMIST: The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
The network will be laid in a 15km ring around the city and will build on an existing fibre network which serves luxury flats and student accommodation.
Long thought of as isolated and poorly connected, some parts of the county now enjoy some of the highest broadband speeds in the country because of an EU-backed project to expand the fibre network.
The sailing venue in Portland, Dorset, for example, will require the building of a high-speed fibre network which would be a good opportunity for BT to build a bigger local network after the event.
The optical fibre network at the heart of the effort makes use of the same types of fibres that transmit data to homes and across oceans, in which light bounces along the fibres' length.
Daniel Heery, who runs a community-based fibre network in Alston, Cumbria, believes that the figure of 10% properties that remain hard-to-reach in Cornwall will be replicated around the country when BDUK projects start to kick in.
BBC: When will UK rural areas get fast-speed fibre internet?
Even Mr Esrey, who at 59 is as much the technology visionary today as he was when he set out to build America's most advanced fibre network more than 15 years ago, seems resigned to letting go, so long as the price is right.
Linked into the city's new fibre optic network, WiBro promises to deliver broadband mobile data speeds far in excess of most western 3G services.
Between them, Japan's ten regional electricity suppliers own the second-largest fibre-optic network in the country, measuring 160, 000 kilometres and growing.
BSES's fibre-optic network in Mumbai seems to be part of the attraction.
It installed more than 20, 000 smart meters, connected them via a fibre-optic network, launched a website to track power use and has started to offer pricing plans that encourage shifting consumption to off-peak hours.
ECONOMIST: Utilities are getting wise to smart meters and grids
Work on the fibre-optic underground cable network will start immediately and be 90% complete by 2014.
This really was the case, absolutely so, back in the days of the main network being copper rather than the fibre optics we use today for those main cables.
FORBES: British Telecom's Copper Cable is Worth More Than British Telecom
After the Asian crisis, the fibre market rebounded even higher as the Internet lit a network boom that continues today.
If the latter seems incongruous in a car-dominated nation, it is largely because, shrewdly, he laid optic-fibre networks beneath the tracks he owned to create the giant telecommunications network, Qwest.
The network would ultimately be used by internet service providers to sell fibre broadband packages to customers.
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