"Countries who jumped on the Internet earlier can't have fiber because of existing competition"
Fiber is actually MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER to deploy for higher speed networks than any high speed copper, because the later almost always implies to deploying a fibre network too to do everything other than the last mile.
1. You have to build your fibre backbone anyways. That's an even bigger trouble in countries with no culture to share fibre. And you would usually have to get much "brainier," and more expensive fibre equipment in this case.
2. You still need to wire the fibre fairly close to premises.
3. High speed copper network equipment costs huge sums, more than commoditised GPON.
4. Copper often needs to be torn, to be replaced with higher grade copper
5. You still need to drill buildings to install niches for copper equipment.
6. You need to put extra equipment into equipment closets.
7. Copper needs more equipment overall
8. Copper has lower reliability overall, and costs more to maintain
So, in the end, you just do the same FTTH, just with copper as the last few tenths of metres. This is so obvious, but people keep dogmatising over "it's already wired with copper."
GPON by comparison does not require anything in the closet, but a piece of glass passive optical slitter.
You can easily have 1024 end-users on a single powerful GePON OLT, covering few square kilometres of 100% passive net.
They are aware. That's why you get 20Mbit/s, maybe 50 if you're lucky. Cheaper in the short term and it's not like you have a choice.
AFAIU, GP is talking about FTTC (or VDSL), which is moderately faster than typical ADSL via existing phone exchanges or (far away) cabinets, while being much more expensive. FTTC can be cheaper than FTTH, but silly IMO - any increase in bandwidth will be expensive.
