I think you raise a good point. In the UK local governments in South Yorkshire to run fibre (well, fibre to the cabinet) to ~98% of the properties in the area,

I think you raise a good point. In the UK local governments in South Yorkshire to run fibre (well, fibre to the cabinet) to ~98% of the properties in the area, costing £100m+ of taxpayer money. It never got more than a couple of thousand subscribers out of the 1.3million people that it passed. It turned out that the large national ISPs would rather use their own infrastructure or wait for BT (the national telecom) to roll out their wholesale solution than have to have a special case for support, installs etc for such a small proportion of their userbase. It got shut down and is now pretty much rotting in the ground.