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A model that seems to work pretty well in Europe (or at least, over here in Italy) is having utility providers (which are already used to handle infrastructure

A model that seems to work pretty well in Europe (or at least, over here in Italy) is having utility providers (which are already used to handle infrastructure at a scale) taking care of deploying fiber everywhere to then sell access back to the ISPs (bitstream). In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable). I have no data but I am also quite sure that those companies are receiving funds from both the Government and the EU. Anyway, they're building the digital highways that we miss and the result for the consumers is not bad: here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for 20 EUR/month. Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.

sandos 10y ago
We have a lot of those networks here in Sweden. The thing is though, it is much more expensive than simpler networks where you have a "group connection" to an ISP. I think its usually double the price to use a service platform fibre network, and sometimes the group connections can be had for 1/4 the price! Although I have to say these new platforms are kind of awesome. The city I live in has a city-wide (and beyond) network where you can choose from 1-1000 Mbps service from several ISPs. And it has "local peering" which means if you send data to/from your neighbor, no matter which ISP they have, the data will only hit your local router in the basement/close by. No need to send data via the internet, or even an IX. In practice though, that performance is not much different from just sending the data on a much longer roundtrip, which makes me sad.

sandos 10y ago

We have a lot of those networks here in Sweden. The thing is though, it is much more expensive than simpler networks where you have a "group connection" to an ISP. I think its usually double the price to use a service platform fibre network, and sometimes the group connections can be had for 1/4 the price! Although I have to say these new platforms are kind of awesome. The city I live in has a city-wide (and beyond) network where you can choose from 1-1000 Mbps service from several ISPs. And it has "local peering" which means if you send data to/from your neighbor, no matter which ISP they have, the data will only hit your local router in the basement/close by. No need to send data via the internet, or even an IX. In practice though, that performance is not much different from just sending the data on a much longer roundtrip, which makes me sad.