The Openreach model does work in the UK, for now at least. There are scenarios that will bring this down but so long as the government is wise to them all will

The Openreach model does work in the UK, for now at least. There are scenarios that will bring this down but so long as the government is wise to them all will be ok. Essentially all the government need to make sure of is that the pension liabilities are well managed and no deal that loads it with vast debt or pushes it overseas goes through. Still we will see. Canada is an interesting one though; the geography is wildly different both in terms of scale (~40x?) and population (60%). Most important : Canada does not have a megacity (London, Paris, New York, LA, etc) London is a pain in the arse to wire up (due to being compact and medieval) but it is very very profitable if you do manage it. This pays for wiring up the tail of the distribution of settlements. Now in the UK we have a tiny fraction of places that are ~10k from exchanges/local offices (places where the backhaul terminates and you have power and space to put kit in). My feeling is that this proportion in Canada will be much much greater. This really screws the economics. Repair overhead is exponential on line length (because you have to mount expiditions to get out and fix the thing). Optics is pretty resilliant (it's not bothered by water) but I think those burdens are going to stretch a neutral pipe provider to the limit. The answer is really that this is a matter for the government and not for private enterprise. Profit motives have limits, the Canadian people need to figure out how much they are willing to pay for rural Canada to have fast internet (> than LEO).