Separating concerns prevents these problems. There should be one company responsible for the infrastructure and other companies competing to provide service to customers.

Deregulation of the Texas energy market should be the model. In Texas, I get an electricity plan that is 100% wind power at a third of the cost of electricity in California. They even gave me a free digital thermostat and installed it for free. The service is reliable and gets restored quickly if there's a natural disaster.

If only telephone service and internet access worked this well.

But I agree, if you give billions of dollars to customer-facing companies to improve the infrastructure, they'll squander it.