My boss told me something interesting the other day. AT&T has been around for a hundred years, and they have ran a lot of copper wire over those years. They als

My boss told me something interesting the other day. AT&T has been around for a hundred years, and they have ran a lot of copper wire over those years. They also hired a lot of linemen to maintain the copper wire, and they eventually formed unions of workmen that maintain copper wire. AT&T is interested in rolling out fiber for several reasons, but one of which is that they get cheaper labor because they bypass the union. The union contracts are written in terms of copper wire, they say nothing about fiber optic, so the annoying unions can be ignored. Also, AT&T has been pretty good about rolling out fiber to businesses at least. I can thing of several older buildings with numerous T1 circuits and plenty of pots lines, yet AT&T still added fiber. Every brand new building that I've been in is served by fiber, for internet, phones (pri trunking), or a data connection to another campus. There are only a couple of pots lines for backup. They might not be too interested right now about running fiber to residentials, but they are very interested in running fiber to businesses. It's possible that it's simply not profitable enough right now, but I can't think of any reasons why the technology won't trickle down eventually. Source: I work as a subcontractor of a subcontractor of AT&T, basically installing Cisco routers and equipment in businesses.