[moriarty-s3a]

This used to be the case in the US after the Telecom Act of 1996. However, the FCC decided on their own to give the ILECs a grace period of a year to implement LLU and then kept extending the grace period. After the dot com bust and the following recession in the early 2000s, most of the CLECs went out of business and Congress gave up and removed that requirement in 2006.

The state PUCs didn't do much enforcement either, but the FCC deciding not to enforce the law killed it.

[toast0]

I'm not sure you have the history quite right; at least in Califonia, the mandated LLU was alive and well[1] for incumbent telephone carriers (ILECs), but the FCC had decreed that it applied to ILECs and not cable operators; and eventually (after much complaining and lawsuits from ILECs) decided it applied to noone, because ILEC + Cable + Satellite + Power line (hah) was a competitive marketplace.

[1] not exactly well -- when the ILEC regularly offers individual customers service at rates under the wholesale rates; and the regulators don't do anything; that's not really working well.