[E]lectronic signals over copper don’t go very far without being boosted, and the companies don’t want to make that investment.
There’s already plenty of repeaters in place to “boost” the signal. The problem is you can’t boost the signal without also boosting the noise. There are sophisticated ways to squeeze out an extra dB or two, but Claude Shannon will always win.
The investment telco doesn’t want to make is laying glass fiber out into the countryside. It’s not terribly expensive, but it will never be profitable. They have been promising to do it for decades now, to justify rate hikes, but somehow it just never seems to happen.
