In some areas, you'd need 10km of fiber to reach 50 households. Considering frequent repairs and maintenance, even with robots that's not cost efficient at what consumers are willing to pay.
I thought you mentioned that some of those numbers where in the suburbs?
I agree that the speeds are awful on an absolute scale, but they’re competing with entrenched monopolies that own legal right of ways that will never be developed. This lets them prevent competitors from running fiber.
Starlink is attacking the same ridiculous regulatory problem. Why build an entire reusable launch infrastructure and custom satellites when laying fiber is dirt cheap? Heck, Facebook says they have a robot that will piggy-back 2km of fiber over existing power lines in a day!
In California, deploying the robots would mean getting PG&E to cooperate, but I could see it helping out in other states.