[soylentcola]

I agree that in lots of places there are franchise agreements and in others, there are specific laws that deter municipal networks.

That said, you could argue that data networks are mostly a natural monopoly because it's not feasible or efficient to roll out several redundant fiber/cable networks.

Even if there were no franchise agreements in place, very few companies (excepting ones that have other revenue streams) would roll out a second or third cable/fiber network in a city where there is already one in place. Even if you managed to split the market and get half of the potential customers, you'd need to account for the cost of digging trenches and laying cable (which cable TV companies have long since recouped). Makes it hard to stay solvent at such a disadvantage.

It's why a lot of people think the ideal situation is for a single physical network to be built and then service providers pay for access and compete on service to businesses and customers. With physical networks divorced from service providers, the company or municipality in charge of the actual cable/fiber makes their money from maintaining and improving capacity so they can sell access to more providers. Providers compete by offering the best services and customer support in order to profit and pay for more bandwidth on the physical network.

But yeah, it's more complicated (in terms of both business and networking tech) but it's an ideal that many would like to move toward.

[talmand]

What you describe is how the power grid where I live is handled. That's one solution I would be more interested in than these monopolies that only seem to create horrible customer service, high fees, and poor product.

But in the end, I'm not sure what's the best way to handle it. I just know that many would agree that the current methods are not optimum, and possibly detrimental.