I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods) and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had 3 competing FTTH providers when

I'm in a fairly rural part of Texas (the middle of some woods) and I've got symmetric 5gbps fiber. The last house I lived in had 3 competing FTTH providers when I left. I don't think the story is what it used to be anymore. I don't know of a single suburban development in the state that doesn't have fiber today. The small ISPs have done an incredible job in some cases. One of the providers had 100% perfect uptime for 2 years, including riding through a catastrophic windstorm that took out the local power grid for ~5 days. I still had internet coming into my house while the water and electricity were gone. I think the very limited power requirements of fiber vs copper is a huge part of what makes this work well in rural deployments. You can power your last 5-10 miles from one box with a battery for days. The fiber itself is also ridiculously cheap. No one wants to steal this crap. It's worthless. I enjoyed seeing the "Fiber optic cable, no scrap value" signs being posted for a while. We don't need them anymore though. The local meth enthusiast community is now fully educated regarding these materials. With everything about fiber being so cheap, the last remaining problem is simply getting it from A to B. It's amazing how far sideways you can go in a day with one man on a ditch witch. You put 3-4 crews out there for a week and it's gonna get done. I've seen them go from nothing to installed customer terminals in 30 days. Sure, they break every utility at least once getting it installed, but it happens so fast the overall briefness of the disruption is worth it. I'm watching some Comcast regional sales people absolutely lose their marbles after a really bad DOCSIS provider acquisition in my area. The door to door sales campaign has become completely unhinged. The copper infrastructure is on death's doorstep now. Fiber is going to bury all of this crap in a few more years.