The problem isn't with copper, it's with the cost of building out amplifiers. It's a lot more cost effective to amplify downstream than upstream, especially whe

The problem isn't with copper, it's with the cost of building out amplifiers. It's a lot more cost effective to amplify downstream than upstream, especially when most use cases are heavily asymmetric. (I'd expect that only in the past year or so has upstream been a lot more heavily utilized, what with massively increased work-from-home due to the pandemic. Before then, the primary stressors of the network were things like streaming 4k60 video. And I'll be very surprised if any ISPs thought torrent uploads to be a use case worth optimizing for.)