Of course, here in the UK, in a lot of places, we have just that - FTTC with VDSL to the home, which a number of companies share. Less common in rural places, o

Of course, here in the UK, in a lot of places, we have just that - FTTC with VDSL to the home, which a number of companies share. Less common in rural places, of course, but in cities and even a number of towns it can be hard to find places that don't have it now. We have a single company (BT Openreach) that's highly regulated by Ofcom which lays said cables and owns the relevant last mile infrastructure. This company then sells access to said infrastructure to retail ISPs. Ofcom has enough teeth to force this company to perform upgrades, through both Government-based power, and the fact that because if the company didn't, the retail ISPs could reasonably band together and lay their own cables (at significant cost and likely regulatory nightmares, but they could certainly tear into Openreach's margins). There's a couple of companies which already do that on their own; Virgin is one, I believe, and it's trying to follow the US "media company" model. So basically: we have a model in which we've managed to allow for a single company to exist without competition because that's the most efficient way to manage national physical infrastructure, but there's enough regulations and threats floating about that it more-or-less does what its customers (the retail ISPs) want, which in turn more-or-less do what their customers (Internet users) want due to competition. That is, we've built a system in which there's enough money floating around to potentially replace Openreach if we really, really had to.