[btilly]

Your counterargument hides a major flaw.

It is true that more traditional offerings have an easier time demonstrating that they should be able to do that. But decades of traditional telecoms failing to hit promised targets demonstrates that they are unlikely to perform as promised.

That said, regulatory capture has let them regularly get away with the argument that you describe. Regulators motivated by politics and corruption have pretended to believe them. Non-incumbents therefore struggle to navigate their higher bar.

[Deprecate9151]

Can't disagree there.

That is why I actually like the approach in the RDOF. It has regular progress check-ins built in, instead of the seemingly no strings attached grants given historically. This stage two review was "are you likely to succeed based on progress since stage one", but there are further delivery checkpoints that come with penalties and bonuses for under and over delivering.