The cost problem of the last mile is not for the 2 meters between the fiber router in the home and the living room. The issue with the "last mile" is that it used to be excessively expensive to lay fiber everywhere on the, literally, last mile outside people's home.
I could plug a network card with an SFP port and have actual "fiber to the desktop" for the last three meters at my place but I don't. I'm not sure that these three meters where I run ethernet are called a "last mile" (off by a factor of 530x calling 3 meters compared to a mile) ad mean I don't have FTTH or that the last mile ain't fiber.
> ... most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs.
What good does it make to laptops and phones using WiFi if the router is doing 40 Mbps max over DSL? It's once you bump that DSL link to FTTH that suddenly all these wireless devices can enjoy much faster speeds. In all the countries I've lived in people at home used WiFi, even from their phone, instead of 4G because 4G means lots of $$$ / EUR.
I think you're underestimating the gigantic speed boost many people are enjoying thanks to fiber (and not thanks to 4G) now that they're having FTTH.
And yet it was done for electricity and telephones over a century ago. And fibre probably has a longer 'shelf-life' as it does not corrode, so the initial installation is more likely to last longer.
I have a 3gbps fiber link straight to my house. The only machines in the house that can use anything close to it are the ones that hook up to my USB-C docking station which has a 2.5gbps ethernet port. Everything else is WiFi speeds.
EDIT: This was a sudden change. I live rural and for the last 10 years I only had 10-15mbps speeds top, and most recently only by point to point wireless from a tower 5km away.
On the sideline there were a much, much smaller minority who looked at those comments in horror, with the context of knowing that wireless was a serious alternative that wasn’t that far away and was being broadly ignored
But it really isn't. There are hard physics limits on how much data can be transmitted within a given frequency band. Fiber total theoretical bandwidth is is essentially infinite in comparison. All the traffic of the entire internet could probably flow through a single fiber bundle perhaps less than a meter wide. For things like streaming 4k/8k/12k (real 4/8/12k) to multiple devices, wifi will never compete with fixed lines.
It's also the better long term tech. Fiber has enormous capacity, while wireless is a shared medium impeded by things like walls, and those problems get worse with the increased frequencies needed for more bandwidth.
Huge parts of the US apparently do not have such legislation, and it is unclear which states that "proposed" it have put it into law.