Yeah, here in the US there are geographically tiny pockets in a few major cities that have actual fiber. Most of the country, including a shocking number of dense urban areas outside the east coast, has zero fiber penetration. Of our two telephone monopolies, one installed fiber for 10 years and quit (the East Coast one), and the other basically never installed fiber to the home.
So anyway, outside that lucky group we all use cable only because the alternative is, in many places, 6Mbps ADSL on aging and flaky copper wires. Or potentially 12Mbps… VDSL? AT&T branded that as U-Verse for a while. But basically they ceded the market to the cable companies.
This talking point may be a bit outdated now... I'm in a small suburban area in the southeast with 5Gb fiber available from AT&T. Around 500k in my municipal area (50k in the city proper).
Idk but I’m still waiting for AT&T to get off their butts, as is most of my county. And this is a nearly fully urbanized county, basically no rural areas here at all, and all the cities touch.
AT&T is allergic to capex and even if they changed their mind recently they waited an unforgivably long time (20 years!) to start. They and their predecessors were happy to take all those sweet subsidies for doing so in the 90s though.
I live in a place that’s rather difficult to serve and I’m just past the range where the full 24 Mbps ADSL2 speed is available so I get 20 Mbps. Once in a while my telco has infrastructure problems, it uses to be common that there would be lightning or power outages and it wouldn’t come back until they did some kind of manual reset, I talked w/ them and the PUC about it and then it seemed like they set it up so it would do an automated reset. The techs tell me if I lived very close to the node they could set me up with much faster VDSL.
So anyway, outside that lucky group we all use cable only because the alternative is, in many places, 6Mbps ADSL on aging and flaky copper wires. Or potentially 12Mbps… VDSL? AT&T branded that as U-Verse for a while. But basically they ceded the market to the cable companies.