Agreed. One interesting approach that took place in Johannesburg was that a suburb took matters into their own hands to get an open access fibre network instal

Agreed. One interesting approach that took place in Johannesburg was that a suburb took matters into their own hands to get an open access fibre network installed. They formed a ratepayers association, got a critical mass of the households to sign up for an installation fee and a promise to join, and appointed a company (Vumatel) to install and run the network. It was transformational: Within a few years average internet speeds in every neighbourhood that adopted the approach went from 5-10Mbps to 100Mbps-200Mbps, with some areas getting 1Gbps. And being open access, it means that you still get competition between commercial ISPs offering their services over the shared infrastructure with a small amount of their fee going back to maintain the network. What's more because the barrier to entry for ISPs was lowered there were a bunch of new and extremely competitive options. I thought it was a really smart way to overcome the chicken and egg problem of high speed internet infrastructure.