You share a loop with the whole neighborhood.
I've heard people claim it is possible, but I'm not really sure how.
Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each direction at 500 meters, and there's no bandwidth contention with your neighbor. And VDSL2 is extremely mature, hardly the state of the art. By comparison, at the office I pay $450/month for dedicated 100Mb/s fiber service from Cogent. And the POTS infrastructure is just about as reliable--which is to say, very reliable.
I live in San Francisco, which is already extremely dense. AT&T owns the POTS system, but they refuse to put in the investment. My switching station is almost 2 miles away. I finally got fiber from Sonic.net. They're investing in hanging fiber over much of the westerner half of the city at a time when AT&T is hemming and hawing about upgrading their cabinets. And interestingly, my fiber service runs straight to that switching station 2 miles away.
The only reason cable dominates is because the phone companies aren't interested in competing. AT&T and Verizon own a huge amount of the POTS infrastructure, but are entirely focused on mobile and cable. It's a ridiculous state of affairs having so much infrastructure managed by the same oligopoly. When I cancelled Comcast and told them I was only paying $40/month for Gigabit fiber there was a long pause--he was absolutely incredulous. Was it a promo price, he asked. (No.) He knew there was no chance of retaining me as a customer.
The dedicated last hop bandwidth of DSL sounds nice, but in practice the shared nature of DOCSIS usually isn't a problem and when it is the solution is no more expensive or invasive than what DSL requires up front for every neighborhood.
I agree DOCSIS has been good enough. But with the shift to services like Hulu and NetFlix I would argue that it's nearing a threshold. And even if it weren't, I bet if a telephone company had somebody as highly motivated as Elon Musk, they'd be able to eat their local cable company's lunch.
The cable company has always had the most bang for the buck. It's something like 60Mb down at about $1/Mb. The phone company is the underdog that gets you from under the thumb of the cable company at a lower speed. It's something like 25Mb down at about $1.50/Mb. Satellites are basically a last resort. I can't recall speeds, but it's abysmally slow at a high price. That's nothing new though.
The local ISP is something that I've always wanted to go with, but they never have the speeds. It's always some form of ADSL capped at around ~15Mb down and ~1.4Mb up somewhere between $1 to $1.50/Mb down.
Your two real choices are cable or phone company, and if you go with the phone company, you pay more for less while still under the stranglehold of a large carrier.
Even in the few areas where Comcast does offer 1Gbps they still only have 35Mbps up stream. It's the cable companies that are being left behind by fiber deployments.
So yes, I could choose to use AT&T, but I would be getting substantially worse service. All cities should be investing in building out infrastructure themselves, as it would increase the desire for companies and people to live and work where they have better connectivity.
SF is flush right now, which makes it particularly outrageous that it doesn't invest in infrastructure. But SF's behavior also tells you how cities got so deeply in debt with nothing to show for it.
E.g. in Maryland, nothing precludes Baltimore from building its own broadband network. It just has no money. Ditto Chicago, or New York. The laws applying to Philadelphia or anywhere in California shouldn't really stop construction either.
The NIMBY is strong in San Francisco. Apparently, even the imposition of the above-ground junction boxes are too much for people here, and so, once again, "We are why we can't have nice things."
Even — if not especially — in a place like San Francisco.
My choices, where I live, are Comcast and DSL (I'm just out of LoS for Monkeybrains). So I give Sonic money every month for a pretty hideous dollar:bandwidth ratio, comparatively, because that's still better than Comcast, in my book.
Only at some levels. Physical last-mile connectivity is a natural monopoly; we shouldn't want more than one trench along each driveway. If an ISP has a local monopoly that only covers one city rather than a whole state, that doesn't change the dynamics of what's fair to their users.