Re: Maybe I'm cynical.
I wouldn't call that cynical - it's fairly well known that providers will generally only compete if they have competition.
Looking at how things have gone over here in the UK, there's a community project not too far from me - sadly not actually near me :-( - which set out to roll out "community installed" fibre to a load of rural villages and small towns. Yup, gigabit fibre for a modest monthly fee which can be even smaller if you've contributed to the build and/or upkeep.
Apparently, many of the villages were on BT's "won't ever get FTTC" list - hence the community project. Amazingly, once the project announced where they were going, then many of the villages suddenly became commercially viable for BT to install FTTC !
BT has a long history of doing nothing until it risks losing business to competition - then it'll wake up and do all it can to kill that competition.
I strongly suspect we'd still be paying a premium for "up to" 8Mbps ADSL (vs 512k or 2M ADSL) if third parties hadn't come along and started offering ADSL2+ ("up to" 24Mbps) using their own kit in exchanges - and the regulator had to step in to force BT to allow that.
