On the other hand, being an L1 fibre provider requires a point of presence in the every location where your customers' fibres are terminated because packets are not fungible. Of course, you could expose L2 access by mandating that an independent party such as OpenReach own that fibre terminating equipment and then have them interface with ISPs in an IXP, which is what I assume you're suggesting. That works. Technically. It worked for LLU to privatise BT's existing network, and resulted in a huge reduction in prices to access the existing network.
On the other hand, it was pretty useless for innovation. Nobody had any incentive to build any new infrastructure, so it just languished. My OR connection is still 30Mb/s, rather than the multiple private 1Gb/s+ providers in my area. Plus OpenReach takes weeks to set up a new service and are useless at fixing faults. Even now, OR fibre, in the few places you can get it, is limited to 115Mb/s upload, and it's expensive, whereas the best private fibre company near me is 3Gb/s symmetrical for £50/month. If as an independent ISP renting L2 access from OR, if I want to provide better bandwidth than OR is willing to sell, there's nothing I can do.
Fibre is tiny and easy to install, relatively speaking. There's not much additional cost to having multiple redundant fibre providers covering a street. I do wonder if there's something we can do to find a middle ground, like open access under-road trunking, or having a right to buy the fibre installation from an ISP and port it to another provider.
But they have to provide nationwide coverage at uniform pricing. So private companies can provide parallel service in dense urban areas for less.
By 2003, the FCC basically gave up. They ignored Congress & said, yeah, fine, broadband is exempt, because it's kind of expensive. Their Trienniel review dismantled UNE/LLU. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-03-36A1.pdf
So now America has nearly no competitive access to broadband.
I don't give a crap about download. I work publically and support my work using YouTube. Every week I'm uploading 20 gigs or so of video, MINIMUM, and if it dropped I'd have to start over. I'm uploading 4k ProRes because my competition is at that quality level or better, and I won't stand out if I look like crud, and what I upload is going to be recompressed no matter what.
Don't tell me about download. I'll just sit reading Hacker News if download's a problem (evidently!). I depend on upload, not download, and I rarely even see it referred to much less touted.
I abandoned a brief dabbling with Starlink before even getting an actual dish, because it didn't look like I was going to be able to trust upload bandwidth to beat what I've got with my symmetrical, reliable 12M. It matters.
Stayed at an AirBnB once that had fiber. I had >100m upload. It would make stuff possible for me that I just can't do currently. Granted, taking advantage of that requires thousands in investment, but what real business doesn't?
Did you know you should get 5000/5000 if you have a lot of smart home devices? hahaha
Last I checked Comcast Xfinity Mobile was one of the kindest soft caps, offering 1.5/.75Mbps down/up.
I think maybe there has been some shift recently around these incredible limits (5.3 minutes/month of full speed use is 0.0001% utilization). Xfinity went up to 50Gbps. I think some plans now "deprioritize" rather than outright limit, which is interesting, but there's such utterly non-existsnt data, such inability to shop & see what to expect.
They have had to make some of the underground junction boxes bigger to fit all the kit in.
My only thought is that they hoped to get their kit in quicker than BT and get brought out. Clearly the aim of these regional companies is to eventually be acquired by larger national ISPs.
Country Mean Mbps
France 120.01
Spain 115.61
Netherlands 113.98
Malta 107.70
Monaco 100.26
Belgium 91.74
Portugal 91.61
Norway 88.80
Sweden 86.76
Germany 72.95
United Kingdom 72.06
Ireland 70.42
Switzerland 63.20
Finland 56.28
Denmark 52.57
Italy 46.77
Austria 45.56
The physical network should be government-managed and any providers can pay for layer-2 access between any 2 points. This will prevent wasteful, redundant infrastructure.