I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.

I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.

There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.

“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”