my new favorite acronym is FTTP or Fiber to the Premises. Origially the name for that idea was fiber to the home, but premises is much more flexable. I love the idea of fiber to the premises because its capable of gigabit speeds over great distances. Noone would be left out because of the 15,000 feet DSL barrier or restricted by DSL speeds. Its the new DSL. I remember hearing about DSL for at least a year before it was available in my neighborhood. I'll never forget the first time I tried downloading a large file from home over DSL and being amazed at getting 25 kbytes/second.
maybe it'll be more economical and a lot less work to get more bandwidth out of the current copper plant, im not sure. there is an article in Oct 04 IEEE communications magazine about the economics of fiber to the home that im going to get a copy of today.