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This did pretty much happen with railways during the industrial revolution. Huge amount of money was invested into railway build-outs and most investors lost their money even though the result was useful in the long run (though only a subset of what was built).

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It also happened with fiber during the dotcom boom. Years later, that came useful when everyone wanted YouTube in their pocket.

The bottleneck was the phone line running into individual houses. ie The "last mile" was a bottleneck. Dial-up. If you're old enough you will remember people connected to the internet via Dial-up, that is, their phone line. It was a bottleneck. It's data capacity was nowhere near what the fiber was.

But that buildout brought FTTN (cell towers, DSLAMs and DOCSIS) because loads was overinstalled in places that made little economic sense at the time.

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