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"Grant money used for GPON is never a good idea"

Uh, false. It's the only worthwhile idea. Long term OpEx for copper is meaningfully higher than FTTH.

I would argue that 100% coverage isn't nearly as important as 90% coverage. People will coalesce around areas that have FTTH, and wiring that last 10% would probably cost almost as much as the first 90%.

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FTTH is great but GPON is bad. The only way to go is "Active Ethernet"/AON. Dedicated fibers instead of sharing them with GPON. That was the intention of my post. With AON you have dumb pipes and multiple carriers can offer their services to the connected customers. With GPON the carrier who owns the headend owns all customers. This means there is no open market and the publicly financed infrastructure will be exploited by the single incumbent carrier.

France has GPON with the ability to pick your provider.

The problem is with AON is that each provider is installing their own more expensive head-end equipment.

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