There are no fibre laggards - just lazy analysis

Every year, like clockwork, the telecom world dons its robes of judgment and unveils the latest fibre rollout rankings. A parade of statistics ensues. Countries are dubbed “leaders” or condemned as “laggards.” Headlines cheer or chide. Policymakers point fingers or pat backs. Analysts nod gravely.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: much of what we celebrate - or castigate - as operator performance is merely geography wearing a badge of competence. Urban density masquerading as strategic genius. Regulation standing in for risk appetite. In all these metrics, context is the missing character, and its absence has consequences - not just for broadband policy, but for how we misunderstand markets altogether.

The geography of glory

Consider the most vaunted names in fiber deployment. Their success is less an epic of execution and more a fairy tale of favourable conditions. Dense, contiguous housing stock; high-rise dwellings with uniform ducts; liberal wayleave regimes; centralised building ownership. These are not operational feats. They are cheat codes.

Contrast that with the so-called laggards - those nations with fragmented suburban sprawl, privately owned Victorian housing, or a regulatory environment that requires telcos to negotiate access as if they were medieval traders petitioning a feudal lord. No amount of “vision” will let you fiber 20 million semi-detached homes at the same pace or cost as wiring up a dense urban conurbation in South Korea. It’s not ambition that’s lacking - it’s asphalt, architecture, and administrative alignment.

And yet, we build policy on this shaky ground. We compare a marathoner on smooth tarmac to one scrambling up scree, and then solemnly ask why one is slower.

The fiction of operator superiority

This mythology of performance does more than mislead - it misallocates. Investors flock to “leader” markets, convinced they’ve spotted operational excellence, when in fact they’ve just stumbled upon an agreeable topography. Governments chase the tail of “what works” abroad, importing tactics unsuited to their native soil. The result? Misguided subsidies, distorted incentives, and operators punished or rewarded for things far beyond their control.

In this way, the myth of the fiber league table doesn’t just deceive - it deforms. It turns telecommunications into a morality play, with heroes and villains cast according to cartographic luck. We pretend that ducts dug in Düsseldorf can be mimicked in Devon, or that what works in the vertical towers of Tokyo must surely apply to the terraced rows of Tyneside.

This isn’t just intellectually lazy - it’s strategically reckless.

Beyond the bars on the chart

The larger lesson here transcends fiber. It is a parable of policy distortion - how metrics stripped of context become idols. We’ve mistaken the map for the terrain. We’ve mistaken outcomes for capabilities.

Worse, we’ve let these errors fossilise into narrative. Industry forums speak in the language of “catching up,” as if the job of a British operator is to become more Belgian, or an American one more Estonian. This is the geopolitics of broadband as cosplay.

What we need is not a new leaderboard, but a new lens. One that sees deployment outcomes not as moral judgments, but as the structural consequences of physical and regulatory realities. One that understands that a well-dug trench in a hard environment is often more impressive - and more instructive - than a mile of easy track in soft terrain.

Toward Smarter Strategy

The first step in fixing this is epistemological: stop worshipping at the altar of abstract league tables. The second is strategic: design policies and incentives that reflect the reality on the ground, not the mythology in the spreadsheet. If capital is to be allocated wisely - if public money is to be spent justly - we must learn to distinguish between luck and skill, between effort and ease.

Because when we confuse context with competence, we chase outcomes instead of understanding causes - and build systems that reward the wrong things.