I wouldn't doubt that suburbia is a mess... I would expect city lines (like water lines and drainage lines) to be fairly accurate in the maps... but who knows. If I'm using a machine to cut through concrete, or a backhoe to dig a hole in the yard for a fiber box... yeah I wouldn't be able to tell if I was damaging a pipe as I went. If I was digging by hand though... I should totally be able to tell if I'm digging in dirt or breaking a pipe.

I installed my sprinkler system, and have done some work on it over the years. I had to avoid damaging other sprinkler pipe and my old cables from Time Warner / AT & T lines that were in the ground. You just dig sort of carefully and it's not hard to avoid breaking things. My gripe with Google is that they aren't hiring people who pay attention, and -- more importantly -- they aren't following up with adequate supervision of the work. (I doubt the contractor company is doing any training past, "Here's a shovel," or checking SSNs of their workers... which is more indicative of Texas than Google... but Google should know the work has to be supervised and verified.)

It's a mess of 5+ contracting companies tripping all over each other and blaming one another and ultimately the homeowners are just left to clean up the mess and pay for the damages themselves. We were promised that everything would be repaired and returned to the original state... and we trusted that Google wouldn't screw us over. They have done so much marketing for Google Fiber... I think it's been like 5 years since we heard it was coming. Take all that excitement and turn it into disappointment... it's bitter. (And add in all the wasted time trying to get them to fix it -- I'd be better off just fixing it all myself since I have to do it myself in the end anyway.)

But back to your comments... I think AT&T used a system similar to what you are describing. They put the line into the box on the street, and then the homeowner had to pay an installation fee to get a contractor out to run the line from the box to our house. When I had it installed I had to call 311 and get the lines marked before they came, and was asked to mark sprinkler lines... ultimately I had AT&T's service for under a month... there was something seriously wrong with it, I couldn't ever get a speed over like 3 down, 1 up (and was promised 30). Their support wasn't able to do anything about it, the store that sold me the service didn't even offer support, and after 3 weeks of that I just said the hell with it and switched back to Time Warner.

My experience aside... I think that very few people opted to pay the installation fee for AT&T so they lost money running boxes out and not getting people to sign up. With Google Fiber, I know they struck a deal with our HOA and we didn't have the option not to have boxes installed on hour homes -- one of my neighbors was like, "I don't want you digging in my yard at all... I don't care about this service." And she was given a letter from the HOA telling her she had to let Google do their thing. Her drip irrigation and stonework were all jacked up in the process... she was pissed. She had like some cement pavers of her kids handprints from when they were little... Google's crew just smashed through them.

Anyway sorry for the book... this is still a bit of a raw subject for me.