It's also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That's precisely what it's made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there's plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to "DSL available" by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.

Over here they're actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.