[hippiehippo]

Instead of becoming an ISP, wouldn't it make more sense for the town to wire up each house with fiber optics and then let ANY company provide services over those cables?

The ISPs will have to pay the town a flat fee per subscriber for using the municipal fiber optics network, or they could roll out (or keep) their own (existing) infrastructure. This way companies will still be able to compete, but the "last mile" will become an utility like the sewage system.

[welterde]

That's the way it's done in the Sweden, Norway and switzerland and their FTTH deployment is far ahead of large portions of europe. So yup.. I would say that open access works.