From previous personal experience in building new plants, and expanding existing plants: Cost of deployment and slow roi are the primary drivers of stagnating local networks.
Complicated corporate accounting, carrier incumbency, and weak governments are the core causes. Carriers being publicly traded companies really screws up incentives to fix these problems. It seems to be mostly a binary decision at the top; more profit or better service?
also, the infra (which ADSL runs on) was build in a time when telephone companies used to be either state-owned or a single monopoly with heavy goverment involvement.
Doing the same thing with fiber is necessary, but will not happen without strong govermental involvement.
Indeed. New Zealand has had a pretty successful fiber roll out over the last several years because the government awarded exclusive contracts to fiber providers that then have to provide access to their network to all ISPs.
Works great. Even my village of several hundred people has fiber now.
Complicated corporate accounting, carrier incumbency, and weak governments are the core causes. Carriers being publicly traded companies really screws up incentives to fix these problems. It seems to be mostly a binary decision at the top; more profit or better service?