If Google's roll-out significantly more expensive than any other type of facilities-based build-out?

In fact Google's product is rational: If you are going to bother to build out in a competitor's territory, you want to get all of your competitor's customers to switch, so you need a disruptive product.

My understanding is that the new build out is cheaper than traditional HFC builds. The difference here is incumbent providers would need to abandon large swaths of their infrastructure to compete with a disruption play in Kansas.

Google is spot on to roll out FTTH, but existing plants aren't going to disappear any time soon, and likely will not react to the disruption play at large.