> I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it

Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out? There's not that many telecoms engineers and if they spend tons of time removing the old, that slows down the new.