It's not obvious whether it's really a bad idea to have several independent fiber networks in the same geographic area. Choice is good. And it would also necessarily imply more total capacity, which is also good.
So deciding the "right" number of network operators in one place is subjective, and comes down to what consumers are willing to pay for. Or at least it would, if competition weren't illegal. There's nothing "natural" about the monopolies we have now.
And even if it turns out that a single network is the best arrangement, it should still be possible for municipalities to choose to own their own last mile fiber and buy transit at competitive rates. Which is also generally illegal in most of the US, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the big incumbents.
And it's also absurd that we're still letting analog-era regulations govern our use of wireless spectrum. We should really have ultra wideband wireless ISPs by now.
They do the same with the fibre network in Singapore, too.
I think the British rail network might work on similar lines? The German electricity companies emphatically do not work on those segregated lines. There are some politically pushes every once in a while---Germany has some biggest price differentials between domestic and wholesale electricity prices (and some of the highest domestic prices), but the regulatory capture seems to be too much to overcome.
Choice and redundant infrastructure are different things.
If you have one wide, dumb pipe, and you paid an ISP to route your traffic from some other point on said local pipe into the backbone, you would have tons of ISP choices. The only reason more ISPs do not exist is because of the infrastructure costs.
And those won't change. You will never be in a climate where it is haphazard to rip up roads or peoples lawns or add more mess to the overhead lines to run fiber channel everywhere. In terms of cost, the fiber cable itself is not even expensive - it is the manual labor installing it all.
> we're still letting analog-era regulations govern our use of wireless spectrum.
It isn't ideology, it is the current incumbent owners of spectrum like having artificial superpowers over the future of communication.
So deciding the "right" number of network operators in one place is subjective, and comes down to what consumers are willing to pay for. Or at least it would, if competition weren't illegal. There's nothing "natural" about the monopolies we have now.
And even if it turns out that a single network is the best arrangement, it should still be possible for municipalities to choose to own their own last mile fiber and buy transit at competitive rates. Which is also generally illegal in most of the US, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the big incumbents.
And it's also absurd that we're still letting analog-era regulations govern our use of wireless spectrum. We should really have ultra wideband wireless ISPs by now.