[xenadu02]

Besides what DannyBee says about termination being a lot cheaper and easier when you can tolerate small losses (which is most people):

Big infrastructure often orders the cables pre-terminated, eg an ISP will order their arial cable with built-in termination at certain intervals. No muss, no fuss.

You're right about single pair though. If you're putting in two strands might as well do 6. If you need 6 might as well do 24. Never hurts to have spares and extra capacity. Especially if it involves stringing poles or digging holes.

[DannyBee]

Yeah, from a cost/redundancy/etc perspective it rarely would make sense to run 1.

I will get pre-terminated for MTP runs, but not for anything else. Fusion splicing connectors just isn't slow (and if i need to go quick, i'll just splice a pigtail onto it until it fails)

I agree for redundancy, etc, better to just add more until loss-of-ROI occurs, but will say doing something for extra capacity for home users/even business users feels like massive overkill these days.

Even 2km 100G duplex transceivers for SMF are <$200 a piece now. Cost is dropping crazily fast. (bidi simplex ones now also exist on fs.com as of a month or two ago, but are still way too expensive)