> Some time later I saw a Pacific Bell truck and crew trenching the street. (We had underground utilities.) I excitedly asked them, "Are you running fiber?" "No, just more copper."

During the Australian NBN^^ rollout. Where I used to live was on the border of a FTTC and a coax/DOCSIS one. My street had no pre-existing cable TV cable so you'd think no brainer to lay fibre. Nope, brand new coax. And because the street had no coax that meant no homes had an existing cable so they had to trench every driveway to connect it to the street. It would have been an absolute no brainer to run fibre then use the existing phone lines up driveways to their homes. Cheaper, and an easy upgrade path to full fibre. This was 2019.

^^Australia built a national broadband network. It was originally designed to be all fibre (except for remote places over satellite etc), but politics happened and it was changed to a multi technology mix which included DOCSIS, fibre to the node then vdsl for the last km or whatever, or fibre to the curb and vdsl up your driveway. And the government entity building it NBN was buying up old copper phone lines and coax.