[antimagic]

No. Firstly, maintenance on those do-it-yourself solutions is high. This is one of the reasons those types of installations are generally speaking not done by telcos - they know that lifecycle costs are actually cheaper if you suck up the upfront cost of installing the cables properly, which actually reduces the price of the system.

Secondly, population density has a huge impact on the cost of installing fibre. As such, comparing Eastern Europe to Australia is just ridiculous. Even when you're in a city in Australia, the vast majority of the population live in detached houses on what are huge blocks by European standards. Those cable nests in your photos just wouldn't exist in Australia for the simple reason that you can't run a cable more than say 50m (any longer and you start to run into engineering challenges such as dealing with cables stretching in the heat, the weight becoming to much to be easily attachable etc) without putting up another pole, and for most Australians you would be lucky to have more than 4 houses within 50m of any given pole.

This is why cabling is a much more expensive proposition in Australia, standards or not. You would actually have to install enough poles, or bury the cables, neither of which is particularly scalable, and hence not particularly cheap. Much of the US has a similar problem, which is part of the reason that bandwidth costs so much in the US (there are other reasons, but this is certainly a factor).

[anon4]

> maintenance on those do-it-yourself solutions is high

Not when it's done by eastern europeans paid eastern european salaries in the years before said countries even joined the EU. After enough time, sure it will cost more than a proper solution, but by that time you would have made enough money to move the cables underground.

And yeah population density, that old bogeyman. I can get how it will cost more in a sparsely populated area, but why does it also cost so much in a densely populated one?