It's what's happening currently with the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia too. NBN Co (the government owned company building/running the network) i

It's what's happening currently with the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia too. NBN Co (the government owned company building/running the network) is not an ISP but provides about 120 datacentres around the country where the retail service providers (the privately owned ISPs) bring their backhaul and hook into the network. I agree that this is 100% the best way to do it - currently here, internet is delivered over a decaying copper network owned by privatised monopoly that is openly hostile to open access, who also competes in the retail space. So the new model should be so much better and encourage so much more competition. We're just hoping that the opposition government (which are likely to come into power in September) will have enough pressure from voters and industry to not put in their awful policy which stops the fibre to the premises rollout and installs fibre to the node instead (costing almost as much, and offering a maximum of 50Mb/s instead of the 1Gb/s that the current plan will provide).