In places like Austin where carriers have wasted money on xDSL deployments, they find they have to go to FTTH once a competitor goes to FTTH. Why? Since the run

In places like Austin where carriers have wasted money on xDSL deployments, they find they have to go to FTTH once a competitor goes to FTTH. Why? Since the running costs of FTTH are so low, an FTTH provider is the low cost provider and will win the value segment, not just the high-end segments. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say, but I think that means you agree with me that competition between telcos leads to better/cheaper product for consumers? To your last point, that telcos don't invest in infrastructure basically because they're greedy (is that even what you're saying?), I think that fits into H. L. Mencken's idea that "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." I have worked at the periphery of a big telco and from what I saw there are many challenges to controlling costs. To name a few: inefficient internal bureaucracies (ugh), strong unions (not a criticism, just pointing out that union labor is more expensive than nonunion labor), and mainly the fact that the network is enormously huge (like, physically huge) and it's extremely expensive to refresh the technology every few years.