I am pretty sure I have told this story before. When I worked for Verizon years ago, I would see the stupid with them. My local manager put together a grew of 4 guys to run two 6 pair drops up the side of the hill for almost ¾ of mile in Hackettstown area to feed 2 houses in the middle of the woods. It took 4 days. A box or two of splicing cans, Rolls of heavy 6 pair of wire, all associate hardware and so forth. Each roll of wire I think was around 350 feet or so. You ran 6 pair only when you had to. Most of the time we would replace a service loop or drop loop with 3 pair. Easier to deal with. They had to figure out a way to cut down the brush along the ROW to the house and run ladders up a hill everyday. Run wire up. By the second day, they brought in another tech just to bring supplies up the hill since the company was complaining it was taking too long to reestablish dial tone! The crew got the job done. 12 pairs of wire split between 2 houses in which according to one the tech only one house needed service. The company thought it was a good idea to run more than needed to the houses just in case. Looking at it as a financial aspect, I don’t know how you can make money this way. Especially in 2010 at the time. There was a real decline in ROI on the wireline side while Wireless was making the money and reinvesting in towers and equipment. Also a new CEO was from wireless and decided wireline was a dead product not realizing fiber was going to be a future product.
So one day after that job, our work group had a meeting about some things. That job was brought up as a topic for safe practices and some other thing. I raised my hand and asked why we would do something like that but not run a same length drop to my house with last fiber terminal only being about the same distance from residence. He said don’t be stupid you know why. I just shook my head and said OK yeah you’re right. Spend tons of money on a product that no one wants any more vs spend money on a product people want.
I went to the Verizon website to look for fios offerings. Of course it is not in my area. No sign ups. Just buy our FWA product and you will have a FiOS like experience. No sign up here for interest or anything. Wow! So they are going to expand with no way to gauge interest. Why spend the money at all.
Unfortunately customers like you have limit access to this overbuilding. Seeing those around you to have more choice in providers and never being to a part of it due to a “financial” decision from the company. Unfortunately people in power don’t see it that way. Laws and rulings don’t force the issue of providing said service.
BTW, I don’t think Altice would be able to go bankrupt due to the structure of the business model based on territorial monopolies and connections with local/regional governments. I don’t know how the business side is structured for governments for either a local telco or cable co in the state. I would think it would be a hard to transfer between the two once a system is in place. This is probably where the real money is. If a local government is using lightspan to feed the local school system, police and fire HQs plus town hall, i am sure its not going to be a simple switch to Verizon if they come to town with their product. Home service makes money but it more like a loss leader type item like gas a Quik Chek or Wawa. It makes money but the store is where the money is really made.