Let me tell you a story about the long-term value of fiber. I live in an area where the incumbent teleco is CenturyLink, though it was originally AT&T (pre-brea

Let me tell you a story about the long-term value of fiber. I live in an area where the incumbent teleco is CenturyLink, though it was originally AT&T (pre-breakup) and then USWest (post-breakup) then Qwest (after a merger with a telecommunications spinoff of Southern Pacific Railroad). In the mid-00s Qwest's management realized that copper cables were a dead-end technology so they began rolling out Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) with VDSL service across their network. This allowed them to offer speeds of up to 140 Mbps on their legacy copper network and lay the seeds for an eventual Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) rollout. In the middle of this rollout they got bought out by CenturyLink, one of the biggest telcos not descended from AT&T at the time. CenturyLink's management did not invest in rolling out fiber (I guess this is where they got the buyout money from) and basically froze the rollout of new fiber for 10 years after the merger. Fast forward to last year and CenturyLink announced they were selling off half their customers to a private equity firm. Coincidentally, the half of the customers they were selling off were primarily in the areas that CenturyLink owned before they merged with Qwest, and the areas they kept were mainly the ones where Qwest rolled out fiber. Apparently their customers on fiber were where all of their profits were coming from, while the customers stuck on their legacy copper network were extremely unprofitable to serve. I'm lucky enough to be in an area where they offer gigabit fiber (from which I can get 800-900 Mbps down and pretty much exactly 940 up) but I feel very sorry for the customers on their legacy copper network as I can't imagine a private equity firm will be any more willing to invest in upgrading them to fiber than CenturyLink were, and many of those customers are in remote locations where their only non-satellite Internet option is CenturyLink DSL.