I'd guess from your description and alias that you're Australian.
Man it took some work to get the model up and running though didn't it? Great idea from one party, totally politically destroyed soon afterwards when the other party got into power, and then slowly, over the course of a decade and a half, has almost reached the original vision.
OpenReach (which was "split off" from BT) puts the infrastructure in place, and OFCOM (our telecoms regulator) defines the price they can charge to ISP's for a connection - so you have a raft of ISP's who compete on price or service.
There are other infra providers though, Virgin Media (DOCSIS Cable) cover some of the country, CityFibre are doing a massive expansion (I now have all three available at my property), Hyperoptic (mostly focuses on apartments).
And then there's Hull ... which is a special case that never became amalgamated to BT back in the day and instead is served by Kingston Communications.
For the most part it works well, but heavy regulations is anethema to some over the US side of the pond and therefore YMMV.
Canada has a similar thing where incumbents have to open up their networks under some cost+markup algorithm.
It worked well for independent ISPs for a while.
But nowadays nobody questions it when that cost accounting went all Hollywood. Now incumbent’s subsidiaries run at a “loss” and sell never ending promo packages for less than they lease the lines out at. That’s just good competition, right? Nothing bad can happen.
Now most of the independent providers have been gobbled up by incumbents (sometimes selling service in other incumbents’ territory so we have the options of Satan-North, satan-west, satan-east and Satan-south). Yay?
If anything there needs to be more regulation in the UK, I don't understand why every year I have to go through the song and dance of calling up my ISP at the time, saying "it's too expensive I'm going to leave", and getting them to put the price down.
It seems like a lot of these companies' revenue relies on people being too lazy or ill-informed to do this so you end up paying way more than you need to be.
It literally takes two minutes on the phone sometimes.
This is probably a function of the marketplace. Honestly, it is difficult to differentiate yourself as a modern ISP, except price. Most normies are using Gmail or the equivalent instead of POP3/IMAP from their ISP. As a result, ISP has cut-throat pricing that is probably heavily loss-leading. Then they jack up prices and how people are sticky -- don't leave. This outcome still seems better than shitty combined telco.
There was a "cable 2" future where content bundles were going to drive differentiation, but then we got Netflix, Disney and Amazon so that went out of the window. I must admit I can't see any future for consumer ISP's apart from the one that you describe.
Man it took some work to get the model up and running though didn't it? Great idea from one party, totally politically destroyed soon afterwards when the other party got into power, and then slowly, over the course of a decade and a half, has almost reached the original vision.
Inspired this book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Frustrated-State-terrible-deterrin...