Re: Typical British clusterfuck
Because there is no commercial incentive and we have no "public service" company to do it. Even if it were a government project, it would have been done by now if it was profitable.
The problem is that it's not profitable to spend £100,000 on permits, street repairs, cabinets, cable, hourly wages, etc. to get £20 a month from 100 people (if you're lucky and sign a load of people up). Not for years. And then you barely eek a profit because of the upgrades and support those users demand without paying much more. All the business plans would basically see a pittance for a lot of effort.
Whereas some roads, or just buying up companies who went bankrupt thinking the pittance would sustain them as in your example, are much more profitable. You know you're going to make money from day one no matter how many sign up.
The % of people affected who would buy broadband from you.
The % of those people who would buy something other than bare-basics broadband.
It just doesn't add up even for a lot of quite "good-looking" streets. You won't make a profit, and if you do it will be at enormous risk.
If we had a state telecoms operator, they would have been told to "just do it", and it would have taken years but it would have happened. As it is, while there's no profit to be made from cabling your in-law's street, nobody will step up and do it and CERTAINLY not when they can just ADSL over existing copper (which you have to compete with).
That's why Virgin push the "fibre" aspect - the speeds, etc. Because, over ADSL, most people wouldn't ever bother to choose them and they're hoping to dig up pavements, gardens and god-knows-what to install fibre for you to do it (which isn't fibre most of the time either, but at least technically better than ADSL even so).
Some things are just not profitable, for small or large companies, even including state subsidies. It probably costs more in copper or fibre to activate that road than you'll see back in 25 years from its residents, if there's a competing ADSL service. Where there is no competition, you'll still only see a pittance after a few years.
And the less people on the street, the further from other streets, the longer the runs, and the most satisfied people would be with just a basic service, the closer you get to making a loss by even bothering.
But in high-density inner-city areas that are well-catered for if you bought up, say, NTL, or Videotron assets - easy money. Guess where the focus goes.
Off-topic, the school I work for was just quoted for a leased line. We are literally 20 metres from the BT exchange (hell, I could lob a patch lead out of the window, it's so close) but their ADSL2+ product is so poor that we've given up trying to balance their dodgy connections over multiple ADSL2+ business lines (my solution of building a Linux-based load balancer / failover router gained us three years of leeway but the modems are so often down or not passing traffic now that it's pointless trying to compensate any more).
The leased line provider undercut Virgin by 20%, and sent us a map of the street cabinet they will run from - it's 12 metres away. The hilarious thing? The cabinet is owned and underlying cable will be supplied by Virgin anyway. They got undercut by their own reseller on a 3-year leased line contract. But we only have that option by either paying a lot of money or being INCREDIBLY close to a huge exchange in the middle of a populated town.
I wouldn't like to think what a leased line costs to some place out in the sticks, for the same reasons as cable and fibre being expensive or unavailable in those sorts of places.