Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

My new contract calls for layout of up to 500 miles of fiber in the Chicago area. I think they want to lay fiber and I think I'll take their money. Just like I took their money 4-6 years ago surveying all of the cell towers they sold off.

I should point out, it's not that they don't want to lay fiber. My bet is that they don't want to lay fiber *to the house*. The "last mile", so to speak, is where wireless makes the most sense to take over.
So we can both be right. And either way you should take their money ;-)

I know I just landed a contract with AT&T to help with layout and easements for new fiber lines, and that will change the game. I'd drop Comcast in a heartbeat if there were a viable AT&T option, and it will be - hopefully before I leave this state.

fiber is the future for sure.  Just very expensive.  I'm in the middle of a 3 phase project to place fiber to 2500 customers - budget is $20 million.
$8,000 per sub

5G is a great improvement in wireless, but simply can't match that fiber connection to the premise.  Not in performance or reliability.

True, and to a business customer, I think it'll have a play. To a residence? Not as important.

if you're using "cable alternatives" the fiber optic cable is going to be the better option than 5G

for folks today that aren't streaming the LTE or 4G wireless can be a good option - if streaming the data caps and rates kill you

unless plans and pricing change drastically for 5G in the future, I assume the fiber cable will be the better option

Right now AT&T only has DSL to my neighborhood, with 3 Mbps download rates. Basically the ONLY broadband option I've got is Cable [Cox]. 
Right now LTE isn't a good option for "broadband" to a home. It might be good per device, but nobody is really even using a single LTE "modem" to drive a wifi router. 
What we're talking about is whether 5G has the bandwidth to be a realistic "wireless to the home" to replace coax cable or DSL. I agree that anyplace that already has fiber in the ground, there's no reason to change. 
AT&T doesn't want to put fiber into my neighborhood with 5G right around the corner. But I'll bet they'd like to pick up subscribers that they can't service now in this area. If they can lay fiber to a cell tower and put in 5G, they can give me a 5G modem that services my whole house and all devices inside, and the difference of whether it connects to a wireless tower rather than a coax cable coming into the wall is immaterial to me.
But to the point, fiber is DEFINITELY needed to support the additional bandwidth that 5G makes available:
http://www.ciena.com/insights/articles/5G-wireless-needs-fiber-and-lots-of-it_prx.html

But to the point, fiber is DEFINITELY needed to support the additional bandwidth that 5G makes available:
http://www.ciena.com/insights/articles/5G-wireless-needs-fiber-and-lots-of-it_prx.html

yes, I do fiber backhaul for cell towers running LTE/4G today.  So far the most VRZ and AT&T have asked for is a 500Meg connection, but I'm sure it will be a gig in the near future.

It's all a question of how much they thin provision their service. That becomes an economic question between how much to build vs how much customer pain is "acceptable" if they can't all download bittorrent at maximum throughput at once.

absolutely
and end users do the same thing - for the customer it's called a "suffer score".  Anything over a 4 is causing considerable pain
it's the "cable alternatives" streaming that causes the pain
so, you either go to bigger pipes - 1 Gig or go back to the old media delivery methods
I don't think we're going back, so 1 gig and larger pipes are the way of the future
it's probably OK that there's not much Ultra HD / 4K content out there

But DirecTV Now is also losing money, thanks to the high cost of programming

http://bgr.com/2018/05/17/att-streaming-directv-now-vs-satellite-cost/

That was mentioned in that article, but not in their linked article. I did a quick google-fu and found one analyst who claims they're losing money, but I didn't see any corroboration in that where there was a quote from an AT&T representative or a financial statement that had line items suggesting it.
So at this point that's conjecture. May be true, and may also have a lot of different reasons:

• If they're trying to amortize the SAC launching a brand new service across the initially-small user base, it would likely show up as a "loss" until they grow to a certain critical mass.
• If they're factoring the promotional pricing that no longer exists [which I'm sure AT&T knew was going to be a loss], it could be true. 

But given that AT&T is one of the higher-cost streaming services (Sling starts at $20, Youtube at $35, Hulu at $40, while AT&T has a limited tier at $35 but their full packages are $50+), I would find it hard to believe that they're losing money on individual marginal customers relative to the cost of programming and the cost of subscription.