It is cheaper to bore fiber and attach more remote systems than to use the already existing copper? I'm curious how you come up with those economics. (seriously, that wasn't sarcasm)
First point is that you can sell the copper. Second is that you can reduce the number of local loop faults because the local loop is digital to the fiber cabinets. Local loop faults seem to be a major cause of overtime work in telcos. The cause of the faults is numerous including stretched copper, cracked insulation, moisture in the bundles, rodents, etc. Have you ever seen the huge bundles of copper wires that come into a telephone exchange? Once you have seen this in person and you understand the complexity of cutting those loops, and splicing, and recutting, and resplicing over many decades, then you will see where it might be cheaper overall to just replace them with OC48 over fiber. Or GigE or whatever, but make it digital and make it go on glass fiber cables.
Yeah, mom was a little aggravated that she lost her connectivity in the valley out in El Salvador because one weekend thieves stole the entire stretch of copper down the mountain off the poles.
Here in London they even steel bronze statues or brass railings in a park to get the copper content. Here is one account of the risks that copper thieves will go to. Don't read it if you have a queasy stomach.
Analysis paralysis perhaps? AKA bipartisan politics.
This was the whole point of regulation to begin with in my opinion; to ensure that every household had a phone line, even if it lost money.
And the day will dawn when governments realize that the technology used to supply service is irrelevant, but everyone needs to have a reliable connection to the Internet. They may even mandate that every connection has to include an emergency voice service that is the old -48VDC POTS in disguise. Today the USA and the rest of the world is still in the pioneering experimental stage of figuring out what works. If Russia forges ahead with FTTH broadband everywhere, just watch how quickly you see bipartisan agreement in the USA.
Of course, who cares about the rural areas.
Do you eat? Anyway there is history in the USA of treating rural areas as a apecial case such as the Rural Electrification programs. The rural people didn't need electricity and could have gotten on just fine without it as they had for centuries before. Even industrialised countries like Russia and Ukraine still have rural areas where there is essentially no electricity, or very occasional and unreliable electricity. Different countries choose different priorities, but over time there seems to be general convergence of all countries onto a basic set of modern services that they want to deliver to their entire population. Some things can be done with competitive markets, and other things cannot. It's all about figuring out which measures to apply to which problems, not about taking a political ideology like communism and forcing it upon every aspect of people's lives. That has been proven to not work and people who call for free-market everything need to realize that they are trodding the same wellworn path that communists travelled in the last century. Furthermore, most Americans alive today do not really remember what a free market was like. When was the last time you travelled in an unregulated cab, ate in an unregulated restaurant, etc.? Even this mailing list is attempting to impose constraints on the free market of network design and operations. Best practices become embodied in vendor products and even people who don't necessarily want to follow the best practices for good technical reasons, can't find the equipment to do it or the people who will build it differently. --Michael Dillon