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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Cities generally have to be at least partially in the telecom business, or there'd be five independent sets of telephone poles on every street.

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In some areas customers can choose among competing providers to have their natural gas delivered through a single set of lines. I've often wondered how feasible it would be to have do something similar with Internet access: The government owns and manages of the physical network infrastructure, but users have a choice of private and/or non-profit ISPs to provide actual Internet service (ie, routing traffic in and out of the municipal network).

Obviously there are a lot of details to be worked out, but are there any significant technical reasons this couldn't be done?

I think this makes a lot more sense in the case of gas/oil, where you actually need something to fill the tubes.

This is the norm in other industrialized nations. It's called local loop unbundling [0], and comes in several different forms. In some countries the local telco monopoly is prohibited from selling to end customers and must lease their last mile cables to other companies at regulated rates. In others they must just provide access to the cables.

There's a lot of evidence that mandatory LLU reduces prices and increases speeds.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Loop_Unbundling

It's not a dream either. There are still plenty of places in central London you can't get decent broadband, never mind the countryside.

It's also relevant to note the background for LLU: the cables were almost all installed by a government owned telco, so there's a clear argument for the infrastructure being owned by the taxpayer. LLU came into existence as government telcos were privatised in the 90s to avoid creating a private monopoly.

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