Exactly, and to expand on this: Apart from major backhaul routes and a little bit of privately owner fiber in a few cities, the main telecoms infrastructure pro

Exactly, and to expand on this: Apart from major backhaul routes and a little bit of privately owner fiber in a few cities, the main telecoms infrastructure provider in the UK is BT openreach a subsidiary of BT which is a privately owned but heavily state regulated monopoly. Every penny of revenue and every decision they take is audited by the government at great expense. Strategic decisions with regards to infrastructure provision are laboriously negotiated with packages of funding supplied by national and regional government. It is a ridiculously bureaucratic and inefficient way of organising things. It's setup like this for ideological reasons because the Conservative party are heavily against any form of state ownership, even when it would be the simplest and most cost effective way of organising something which market forces naturally push strongly towards monopoly ownership. Also, in relation to another comment below, we are purely talking about ownership and maintenance of the wires under the streets, no one wants to go back to forcing everyone to have the same colour Soviet style state issued phones of the early 80's. I'm also not saying that the cables are installed by government, you still let the contracts for this to the private sector. Just don't let the private sector drive strategic decisions about infrastructure investments which pay off indirectly by increasing the competitiveness of the economy overall.