Yeah, they just have no vision. It's like the process to use fiber-optics for my home telephone. Note, I've left out a number of minor connections, mind you. In the phone company's office there's a master computer that's electrically wired to a high-speed electrical jumper-box that patches the wires through to the input side of an electrical-to-optical high-speed multiplexer which then connects an optical jumper on the output side to another patch-through optical jumper-box, which connects the high-speed multiplexer to a optical jumper that goes to a high-speed jumper-box and is then connected to a high-speed to low-speed optical-to-optical multiplexer (with internal optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversion) which connects a low-speed optical jumper to an optical jumper box that connects to a cable which sends the light out through a main cable to my neighborhood which then comes into a cabinet where a patch-through optical jumper box runs a fiber jumper to another optical-to-optical multiplexer, which then steps-down the optics to a lower-speed fiber-optic line which goes to yet another optical jumper-box then out of the cabinet through a fiber-optic cable to a small optical pedestal in front of my house which converts the optical signal, yet again, to an electrical signal that runs through a wire to the front of my house into a wall-mounted termination box that's then wired into an inside jack that breaks the signal into phone/cable/internet which goes through a cord to my PC, where my computer decides what to do with the data.

I let them know long ago, that since my home computer has a built-in optical reader, the CD drive, it could, of course, use that device to do all that other fancy stuff like on-demand bandwidth choice of whether to look at cable, talk on a land telephone, use a cordless phone, surf the net, etc, and they could eliminate every single other piece of equipment in the route between their office and my house, and just run a pair of optical wires the size of a fishing line into my house and I'd be able to let my PC (with a little help from some software designers) choose what service it wanted (cable, telephone, internet) out of the bandwidth which entered my house. Unforunately, job-security would be eliminated for all the folk whose job it is to keep the Rube Goldberg network humming.

It's only ridiculously complex and expensive, until someone comes up with a better mousetrap.