Judicious government investment into telecoms infrastructure in certain European countries has led to fast, cheap and stable communications. Government investment doesn't always equate to bad; if it's bad it means that particular government body did a bad job in that particular case, that's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasktel
They were the first, or one of the first companies in north america to offer: Video-On-Demand, Fiber to the home, IPTV, HDTV over IPTV, HSPA, ADSL, etc.
This is while servicing a province with roughly half a million people and is larger than every American state minus Alaska and Texas. While at the same time serving hundreds of small communities with full speed access.
This is at the same time as offering plans and service that is much better than what you can get in the surrounding provinces that have cities that have more people than the whole province.
In some ways, privately owned companies that only have to compete with 2 or 3 other entities is far worse than a government monopoly.
There is much higher levels of competition, enforced by government regulation though.
And mobile network is also heavily dependant on landlines, which were built by government owned telcos.
Recently began (2009) a national gigabit to the mast rollout project in a medium-sized European country which is almost complete now.
This didn't use a legacy copper investment (or even legacy fiber, not that there was a lot of that).
However 20 years ago the ubiquity of state sponsored infrastructure is what enabled fast and competitive coverage of Europe with mobile telecommunications.
It's just an example of how what our US colleagues would call "socialsim" can provide better results than "free market".
There is a point I just realized. Whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in Europe - it is forced to provide a service to all, even if it means loss in some cases. However whenever there is a state sponsored monopoly in US it just removes competition, while internally the organization still sticks to the "profit first" doctrine.
I agree that government sponsored monopolies probably could not keep up with the pace of innovation. However in industries where natural monopolies occur, I think they are the better solution then private enterprise.
In Canada, it used to be that receiving text messages was free. However, one of the three carriers decided to charge for incoming texts. Sure enough, in less than a year, the other two carriers followed and also charged for incoming texts. I have a strong feeling to say that sort of behavior would not occur if there was a government sponsored monopoly.
The obvious solution is better regulation, but I don't think anyone has found a solution to regulatory capture yet so I'm not banking on anything there.
There are many aspects which the government should regulate (common carrier status for internet, anyone?) but I think that in this aspect our biggest problem is that the barrier for entry in the Canadian market is too high, and so it's exceedingly difficult to disrupt.
Because there's such a lack of competition the big telcos get to basically collude with each other.