I recall reading an article a while back about a neighborhood that had a fiber network that was put in when the community was built as a selling point. Every single house had fiber in place for TV, Phone and Internet. Sounds great! Right? In theory yeah, but not so much in practice. Every house had a network fee added as part of their homeowner's due. This fee went to an external company that ran the network. This company didn't have much or any incentive to properly manage, update or keep the network running. They had a captive audience. Everybody pays every month whether they use the network or not. Network down? They'll get to it in a bit after they take care of their competitive neighborhoods. And though fiber sounded great, the speeds they were getting weren't much different than other areas near-by on cable modems. So want to forget it and go with Comcast? Sorry, they don't serve the neighborhood as they can't be competitive when everybody in the neighborhood is already paying for the fiber network. I recall the neighborhood association had gone through a couple of different management companies, with pretty much the same result. In short - beware of turning over your network to someone without an incentive to make you happy. Of course, in many areas (like mine) there is no real competition for high-speed Internet. It's Comcast or nothing...
I see no problem with this setup if the homeowners association own the network, and can bid out managing the service to private ISP's. That's the ideal setup, IMO. Consider the data pipes a utility, but let free market forces drive service.
If they were able to let multiple companies offer service over their community-owned dumb pipes, that would indeed be ideal. But my recollection is that were hiring a single private ISP to manage it all. Maybe they were too small for Comcast or Cox, etc. to bother with in this unique setup? I'm afraid the same thing would happen in small towns if the town itself owned the network.
Yeah as bad as the first part of your post sounds it really isn't much different than my reality in a "traditional" ISP market here in the US.
Technically I have two choices, Time Warner Cable or AT&T DSL. Realistically I only have one choice because Time Warner Cable has proved that they are unable to keep an internet connection between my modem and their headend working for more than 6 hours at a stretch, so I'm stuck with 6mbps AT&T DSL, which is slow and overpriced relative to speed/caps but at least mostly reliable.
