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Any ideas about what's going on?

I don't have an insiders view on this one, I do however deal with telco guys pretty frequently. Fiber is being deployed in the local loop, not fast, sort of slow and plodding but I think it's just a matter of time before we have gigabit speeds just about everywhere. Buying dark fiber right now may just be a good investment if you've got the capital. ComCast here in northing NJ is quietly upgrading everyone to 6mbit cable. Some of the telcos are upgrading DSLs from 1-2mbit to 3-6-9mbit. Looks to me as if the guy holding both ends of a fiber line from one town to the next could be a big winner when demand arrives in the next 5+ years.

Google could also be looking to provide VOIP which will continue to grow. 5 Cents a minute on all long distance is a bargain that most people don't even know exists yet. It's a big step though and they don't have the assets.

I've got a friend who works in the telco business and he said 5 or ten years ago during the dot-com boom, fiber was just too expensive to trench and light up. Sure there were fiber lines down back then, but they were far and few between. I can remember in high school back in the late 80's, the local telco wired all the schools together for interactive television and of course they had ITV hubs set up around the eastern part of Montana for teleconferencing, then they expanded to telemedicine, and about the time of the dot-com boom, they were doing telemedicine. Linking the smaller hospitals into the larger ones in the state. While the heart center is over 360 miles away, the specialists at the heart center can actually assist the local physician with heart operations over the ITV link.

Now, back to this friend of mine who works at a telco. He told me that once fiber is rolled out, and installed right up to a person's home, the distance limitations of DSL will be a thing of the past. Fiber has the same amount of capacity to provide enough bandwidth as one one analog television channel, which roughly translates out to about 6 Mbits/second.