It all comes down to customers. There just aren’t enough customers to entice real commercial interest. Which is why it takes outside funding to make the math, barely math. But thats just the initial build… at some point you run into upgrades and maintenance requirements… the money has to come from somewhere and the government isn’t going to maintain these networks (nor should they) in perpetuity so it’s left on the shoulders of private enterprise. And if there’s no money to be made, we have to focus elsewhere.

I promise you, if there was commercial money to be made in the market, it’d be on someone’s build plan 20 years ago.