Re: Not just 'rural' connections
Here in Italy the things are becoming even "funnier".
In 2015 the government asked telcos what houses without broadband connections (ADSL only, or worse) they were going to cover in the next five years. What was excluded would have become part of a state/EU-funded plan to cover them as "market failure" areas. This network would have been state-owned, and run for twenty years by a wholesale-only concessionary.
Our equivalent of BT and owner of the copper nwtwork excluded a large number of them - sure to win the public tenders that would have followed. Just, they lost them (they proposed FTTC and 4G, to keep alive the value of the old copper network, the winner proposed mostly FTTH and a some faster FWA). Now faced with a plan that would have make the copper network worthless soon, they decided to try to stop the whole FTTH rollout.
Immediately after they lost the tender they declared they would have covered in FTTC a lot of the very same areas they explicitly excluded in 2015. In some areas they obtained to stop the public-funded works wholly, even when they had already started. I live in one of what were the four "pilot" towns of that project. Works started in late 2017 but were stopped in 2018, after only a detached "rural" area was cabled, because closer to the fibre backbone. This very situation recently went on the national news, as the pandemic required to attend school lessons and work from home when possible.
In other areas where they could not obtain to stop the works, they started to deploy FTTC to get customers before FTTH becomes available (chained to four years contracts...), to make the whole plan non remunerative, trying to force the government to "unify" the networks, in plain words let the incumbent swallow the company that is deploying the fibre network, take full ownership of the network, and kill any competition.
In the beginning of March the Antitrust authority fined the company 140M for those actions. Previously it barred the activation of cabinets in areas covered by the public project - which they continued to do nevertheless...
When the pandemic struck, they took advantage of it to get the permission to activate cabinets in those areas already getting FTTH. While in the areas where they were able to stop the FTTH, everybody is left in ADSL only.
Meanwhile for its own bad management the fibre cabling company is later and later, and what should have been ready in 2020 has been postponed in 2023, despite a lot of houses now not getting FTTH as planned previously.
More and more towns are having a few houses in the outskirts cabled with FTTH while the inner parts are left in ADSL, even when they could have been easily connected, but the rules forbidding spending state funds in competition with private companies does not allow it. When the pandemic is over, tribunals will be busy.
I wish they said "we don't care, let the State pay for it" - I would have already FTTH by now. These are exemplary situations where telco interests, especially the incumbent ones, totally diverge from citizen interests.
I wish UK citizend more luck than here.... but keep your eyes open on any state project and the inevitbale barrage fire by incumbents.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
