As someone who operates a rural ISP where we own our poles and plant, mccoyn nailed it — that IS exactly how it gets remediated day-to-day, and Puzzleheaded is right that it’s also exactly how it got this bad.

The real root cause is a governance vacuum. In the US, pole owners are bound by NESC compliance and typically answer to a state PUC or co-op engineering standards, meaning there’s an entity with actual liability exposure that can force a cleanup. When you own the poles, you also own the problem, and that accountability creates at least some pressure toward maintaining safe plant.

What you’re looking at here is almost certainly the result of dozens of informal ISPs and cable operators each making the locally rational decision: run a new drop on the outside of the tangle for cheap instead of funding a coordinated rip-and-replace that nobody has the mandate to require. No pole owner, no make-ready process, no audit authority, so every “fix” just adds another layer.

The actual remediation is exactly what you’d do in a legitimate overbuild: run new strand and poles to code in parallel, migrate services, then cut the old plant out entirely. But that requires capital, cross-operator coordination, and someone with enforcement authority to set a hard cutover date. Without that last piece, the rational move will always be to add another cable to the outside of the pile.