Regardless, my point was that deregulated land lines in the USA were less expensive, were almost 100% reliable, and were more widely subscribed than any other country in the world.
Remember the last time the US Congress decided that we needed to imitate European telecoms?
Credit card chip readers. Literally billions of dollars were spent to replace our entire electronic payment system.
Two years later, I got my first RFID Visa card. I have not used a chip reader in a major store in close to ten years.
Nothing, and my copper system usually had superior sound quality. But I was more or less forced into switching to fiber optics because the phone company was no longer maintaining the copper system properly. The backup batteries that kept the system going when the power was off were gone. The phone went dead at the moment the lights went out. And then there was the struggle of waiting for them to bring the copper system back on line after a power failure. It just wasn't a priority for them. They basically told me that I was SOL unless I switched to fiber.