[Desdinova]

In the US you may actually see more fiber being put in due to the (i dislike this next word) convergence of telephone, tv and internet. ATT and Verizon are currently in the process of providing tv and internet to its subscribers if you live in certain areas of the US. Verizons is by running fiber all the way to the premise (only bad thing about this is the connection is powered by your homes power so if you lose power you have lost your phone as well). ATT is of course using the current copper cables running to your house and as has been mentioned the copper is getting old. It is however a start, unfortunately the rural areas are going to be the last to benefit from this. There are two main reasons the rural areas are the last to get anything the first is the fact that they are opereated not by "THE BIG MONPOLIES" but by one of the thousands of smaller telcos that in some cases are literaly mom and pop operations (though more and more are merging into/being bought out by larger companies (but not by "THE BIG MONOPOLIES" as they are selling off non/low profit areas). The second is of course the fact they more profit can be made by upgrading in the major metropolitan areas than the rural ones, so unless some something forces the telcos to upgrade then its not going to happen soon in the rural areas.

The other countries that have better facilities than we do have the benefit of the past 100 years of trial and error that have gone on here in the US. They have been able to skip several generations of equipment and of course several million if not a couple of billion of (insert choice of money here) to upgrade facilities. just like all those people that are just now buying computers and getting far more than they need while the rest of us have put out money year after year on upgrades to our computers. You are looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars to upgrade a single piece of equipment, in most cases the equipment is so old you have to replace with new equipment. The telcos are upgrading, however at this time the upgrades are to the backbone network and not the end facilities going to most residential and business locations. So it will happen but not as quickly as we would like it to.

The concept of competition in the telephone portion is dead as there is no longer any real profit there, its going to be the multimedia that you are going to see competition and the cable companies are doing their best to keep everyone else out. Wireless has potential but again there it will be driven by multimedia and not telephone usage. The laying of additional fiber is also hampered by the fact that it cannot be putdown using the existing right of ways as easily as the original copper facilities were since there is much more traffic (cars, buses, trains, etc) where those right of ways are.