> I meant about wired Internet access. Running 10 wires to your house to have access to 10 ISPs is expensive and it's also a nightmare for the city. It is extremely wasteful because most people will only use one of them at the time.
In Paris, you don't need to run separate cables into a building for each ISP. Orange Telecom owns the infrastructure and leases it out to the different ISPs. They then share the cables but have different end point hardware where the main trunk lines hook into the apartment buildings. Perhaps this is different in other residential communities, but from what I gather, once the infrastructure and wiring is in place, consumers can switch between ISPs and need only switch modems. Switching from Orange to another ISP would not need rewiring.
My only problem with this "natural monopoly" method is it ensures a minimum price, which is not really decided by competition, but more likely on the return on cost to wire the country for fiber as agreed on with the government who owns 23% of the company. Then there's a lot of skullduggery with contracts (e.g. first 3 months for $19.99 then it shoots up to $50, some ISPs have 6-month contracts, others are month to month with no penalty if you disconnect).
France does a lot of things like this, which makes sense when dealing with national infrastructure, but it doesn't quite do the consumer justice when the ISPs are rentiers selling bandwidth. I can only imagine how quickly it will take them to recoup their costs of wiring fiber.
I bet the US could benefit a lot by sharing infrastructure, but it doesn't necessarily mean all will be perfect.