Just to give you an idea of how the infrastructure looks elsewhere in the world.
That's an Irish FTTC (Fibre To Curb) and possible FTTH (fibre to home) node.
The newer looking green cabinet is a VDSL2 DSLAM with a fibre connection back to the central office. That typically provides up to 100Mbit/s down and 20Mbit/s up over your copper line to the house (max line length is 1km and speeds are more like 70mbit/s down 20Mbit/s up for a lot of people e.g. my line's about 650m long).
The wider older looking green cabinet is where all the underground connections to individual homes come up and are patched to the underground line back to the local exchange (central office). Basically, the telco just installs that second cabinet and they interconnect lines with the VDSL2 service in the 2-door cabinet next to it.
The small galvanised steel thing is just the electricity services and power meter for the fibre node.
That node serves up to 192 homes, but in general in Ireland anyway they might only have say 50-100 customers per cabinet, so you'd have those dotted around street corners in cities, towns, villages all over the country.
They've been installing thousands of these over the last couple of years and should cover 70% of homes in the state by next year. (the rest mostly being really rural).
We've quite low population density compared to most of Europe with <4% of people living in apartments so, it's quite like less dense parts of the US or Canada in most respects - individual homes spread quite thin.
Using FTTC nodes with a noise-cancelling technology called 'vectoring' has proven to be a pretty decent step towards improving coverage though. We've now got a lot of people getting up to 100Mbit/s over a single copper pair which is pretty damn impressive given it's just a short phone line to a street cabinet.
Cable's pretty widespread in most bigger urban areas (by big urban in an Irish context I mean like towns of >15,000 people). They can get up to 200Mbit/s at the moment on residential services and 250Mbit/s on small business services using EuroDOCIS 3.0 and lots of fibre in the network.
Genuinely rural areas are often reliant on fixed-point wireless service though. Some of that's good, some isn't. There's a major rethink going on about how we're going to fund that in the coming years. So far, it's actually received relatively little state aid, but that's probably going to change this year with a plan to ensure that no home has less than 30mbit/s and most will have >100mbit/s...
We still get a lot of people here making somewhat ridiculous comparisons though and making claims like EVERY other country has fibre to rural homes or comparing their rural broadband in a remote house in the commuter belt of a town with 102 people with what you can get in downtown Tokyo and then concluding Ireland's behind the times.
The node in the picture below would give you access to services from up to 15 different ISPs as the incumbent telco has to let other companies use its local access networks. So, you can pick from quite a few data and voice services even if you don't have access to cable in your area.
