This is the key - capitalism only works when there is viable competition, otherwise it's just a monopoly.
They got around this in the UK by splitting the monopoly (well, except for Kingston upon hull) into BT and OpenReach. OpenReach provides the infrastructure, and are bound by government regulation to provide open access to last mile infrastructure for a fixed fee per product - this allows a load of ISP's to offer their own value-add services.
AAISP is pricey, but you get legendary support
Zen is less pricey (and unlimited) and good support
PlusNet is cheap as chips
The one are this is different with is FTTP - because of the slow roll out on OpenReach's part, plenty of smaller providers have stepped up and built their own infrastructure and cover various parts of the country.
Is it perfect? Of course not, but I'm paying 54 GBP a month for 900 down and 110 up FTTP.
That's how DSL was supposed to work in the US. The telcos sabotaged it by not maintaining their copper lines and forced the independent ISPs out of business.
Not really; they just lobbied the Bush II Administration into crippling the Clinton-era rules that required them to allow competitive DSL providers.
The requirement was called "Local Loop Unbundling" and it required the RBOCs (legacy local telcos, from when the Bell System was broken up) to lease "dry pairs" to various competitive DSL providers at reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates. And for a few years it worked! The dialup ISPs started to move into DSL services and it looked like we would have real competition (admittedly DSL, but this looked decent enough at the time).
But they lobbied the shit out of Congress and got LLU killed in the early 00s.
They got around this in the UK by splitting the monopoly (well, except for Kingston upon hull) into BT and OpenReach. OpenReach provides the infrastructure, and are bound by government regulation to provide open access to last mile infrastructure for a fixed fee per product - this allows a load of ISP's to offer their own value-add services.
AAISP is pricey, but you get legendary support Zen is less pricey (and unlimited) and good support PlusNet is cheap as chips
The one are this is different with is FTTP - because of the slow roll out on OpenReach's part, plenty of smaller providers have stepped up and built their own infrastructure and cover various parts of the country.
Is it perfect? Of course not, but I'm paying 54 GBP a month for 900 down and 110 up FTTP.