[tialaramex]

In the UK, which is what we're talking about, the situation goes like this:

For most people there is FTTC or FTTP owned by "Openreach" the successor to the national telephone monopoly which thus owns most of the "last mile" of copper cable either under pavements in urban areas or hanging from telegraph poles elsewhere.

Openreach doesn't offer service to end users, its products are wholesale only, ISPs buy the wholesale product, at prices fixed by regulation, and sell Internet service (they also of course need to buy backhaul, routers, set up a call centre and so on, Openreach just makes the "last mile" work)

Thus, most big UK ISPs are using Openreach and you could switch to any of the others (including A&A), in principle literally overnight, since all the physical infrastructure is unchanged, just somebody has to plug different values into a database so they're billing a different ISP and your traffic goes to that ISP not the previous one.

[ Under the hood it's slightly more complicated because you can buy some backhaul from Openreach or from competitors who own long distance fibres. In a major city it may be cheaper to use some startup to get 10Gbps of data from your customers in that city to your data centre in another city, after Openreach gathers it all up somewhere, rather than paying Openreach, who also own fibre, to move that data to your data centre. ]

The main exception is if you have cable TV in your area (most larger cities, some suburban regions) you can choose to buy the DOCSIS service from the only company that owns all large cable TV service in the UK, Virgin Cable. In this case Virgin is your only possible ISP. For maybe 10% of UK residents this is the most practical way to get "good" Internet access, a larger percentage could buy this, but they could also switch to an ISP using Openreach and still get acceptable Internet access.

A relatively small number of users live somewhere with no decent Internet via Openreach, no cable TV, but enough local enthusiasm plus money to bury fibre and build their own network. In these cases again the only ISP is the one that buried the cable, but they're usually community owned, so I guess if they do censorship (and I don't know if they do) you'd be better placed to argue that policy should change than I am.

[hertzrat]

That’s not a terrible system from the sounds of it. Speaking of fibre, how is the rollout going? It seems like, if private companies own the last mile for fibre, the system described will eventually not really exist in 20ish years as people gradually upgrade?

[tialaramex]

Openreach runs fibre to new build properties (it's literally free if you say "I'm a house builder, here's my plan for where these dozen new houses go" they'll turn up and run fibre just the way they'd have run copper cable to make telephones work forty years ago) or, where necessary or when paid to replace copper to old sites, and that would become available as the wholesale product. Last mile service is a natural monopoly, so outside of city centres you'd always expect there to be one provider, Openreach, which is regulated to provide wholesale service.

In a city yeah, it'll make sense for some startup to run a few miles of fibre to deliver Internet just to properties likely to want to pay extra for fast service, and they would own that fibre, but they'll have competitors so there's less threat of problems.

For Openreach there's a web site (and an API) to basically plug in an identifier for a telephone line and get out what wholesale products are available for that location. ISPs could in principle find that you have 300Mbps fibre available, and even though you purchased their cheap 1990s-style ADSL service they decide to pay Openreach to enable fibre, but then they just clamp the data flow to 10Mbps so you're not getting a better service. I don't think that would make any commercial sense, but they could do that if it makes sense to them.

A friend lives not very far from me on a weird little road near the university that just sort of runs down a hill to nowhere. That road isn't "adopted" (it is notionally owned by some of the people who live on it, and local government won't pay to fix it) and it turns out this meant they didn't get FTTC. So they just did a fundraiser to pay Openreach to run FTTP into their road. I was shocked somewhere like that doesn't have modern Internet so I donated a little money.

When the work finishes the residents don't magically get (better) Internet service, but they will have fibre, that'll appear in the API and so then they can buy fast services which they'd previously not be eligible for because the ISP does an API call and sees there's no fibre option.

If you're wealthy you could sidestep all this and pay Openreach to run FTTP specifically to your home, but I'd guess that as well as being expensive (not new Ferrari expensive, but a lot more than a new MacBook) this would put you in some huge queue of weird vanity projects for which Openreach has finite workers available. So maybe they don't dig a trench until 2022.

[bigfudge]

In my experience fibre is a great benefit for 'normal' use. Streaming, browsing, email are all fine on 20mbs services. Unless you have lots of teenagers watching Netflix it's not obvious to me you'd want to pax 2x as much for fibre