There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlußleitung). No copper meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and ava

There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlußleitung). No copper meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and available optical networking technology wasn't cost-effective during the first years of DSL rollout. Rumor has it that the old OPAL infrastructure can be used for GPON today, but that became available only much later. For many years, your best hope as an OPAL customer was that the incumbent eventually deployed copper. I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger. (The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)