[tyfon]

What happened in Norway at least was that when the state telephone company Televerket that is now Telenor was privatized, they required them to lease the land lines and mobile spectrum to others at cost.

This worked really well so now there is a health population of companies in both the telephone/mobile and isp sectors.

I can get at least 5 different wired isps and maybe 50+ mobile broadband providers in the outskirts of a town of 60k people.

[zo1]

I can attest that the same thing happened with the telephone company here in South Africa. A while after its monopoly was taken away and regulation required that public infrastructure be rented out to any ISP that wished to use it, things started thriving after a long period of stagnation.

In fact, ISPs thrived, and a lot of them are now installing and contracting the installation of their own Fibre to a lot of residences. Essentially, side-stepping the existing copper infrastructure that kept people tied to the telco monopoly.

[ksrm]

The same thing happened in the UK with BT. There is genuine competition and it works reasonably well.