[notyourday]

That's not the way it worked.

The access was provided only to dry pairs ( think alarm wires) for DSL if the carriers had unused dry pairs ( they did not ). To do that, one needed to colocate in a certain number of COs ( large ), take at least a rack per CO ( $2.5K-5K ) even if one had only ONE subscriber. The rack was placed into a special area of CO (so only some COs had them - there was no requirement to build out that area ) and finally in order to terminate anything out of that rack one needed to buy a crazy expensive service from the CO carrier ( think $10-15k/mo ) to get a DS3 or OC3 out.

This meant that absolutely no sane ISP could really afford to do this as there would be no customers wanting to pay hundreds of dollars a month for IP service. ISP DSL access was a replacement for T1s selling for $1.5K/mo between loop and IP, not for residential.

There was no requirement to share fiber builds.

[wpietri]

As someone who got residential internet service for many years through a colocated DSLAM, paying something like $60/month, I think you are overstating your case.

Regardless, I agree it never took off as regulators intended, but my point was the intent was similar: mandatory shared last-mile infrastructure.

[notyourday]

Your service ISP lost money on you every month.