I would agree with you on water, gas and electricity, but that's mainly because those installations are bulky and H2O, CH4 and electrons are (relatively) fungi

I would agree with you on water, gas and electricity, but that's mainly because those installations are bulky and H2O, CH4 and electrons are (relatively) fungible. On the other hand, being an L1 fibre provider requires a point of presence in the every location where your customers' fibres are terminated because packets are not fungible. Of course, you could expose L2 access by mandating that an independent party such as OpenReach own that fibre terminating equipment and then have them interface with ISPs in an IXP, which is what I assume you're suggesting. That works. Technically. It worked for LLU to privatise BT's existing network, and resulted in a huge reduction in prices to access the existing network. On the other hand, it was pretty useless for innovation. Nobody had any incentive to build any new infrastructure, so it just languished. My OR connection is still 30Mb/s, rather than the multiple private 1Gb/s+ providers in my area. Plus OpenReach takes weeks to set up a new service and are useless at fixing faults. Even now, OR fibre, in the few places you can get it, is limited to 115Mb/s upload, and it's expensive, whereas the best private fibre company near me is 3Gb/s symmetrical for £50/month. If as an independent ISP renting L2 access from OR, if I want to provide better bandwidth than OR is willing to sell, there's nothing I can do. Fibre is tiny and easy to install, relatively speaking. There's not much additional cost to having multiple redundant fibre providers covering a street. I do wonder if there's something we can do to find a middle ground, like open access under-road trunking, or having a right to buy the fibre installation from an ISP and port it to another provider.