From the website of a nearby community:

Apparently about 10 years ago Cascades was part of some national fiber-to-the-curb experiment that fizzled out. The great paradox of the more modern fiber versus the venerable copper is that DSL today is a copper-based technology and does not work over fiber.

So it’s more than just an issue of a fibre switch.

It seems time to encourage someone — ma bell, or (oof) the gub’mint — to put some sort of money into the existing FTTC and FTTH deployment. I never knew those two were part of the so called “last-mile” connectivity. All things considered — regionally, technologically and corporately — I’ve never seen a nuttier irony in my life.