It's an uphill battle. Local governments in the US sign franchise agreements with cable companies and telecom providers. Many of those agreements give the cable company exclusive geographical rights to the area in return for hooking up the entire town.

So when another ISP shows up and wants to string cable all over the poles...guess what? They're turned away. Verizon FiOS found this out when trying to get into markets where AT&T had the telephone franchise.

Call it a monopoly, call it anti-competition. But America is huge. There's no other way to get a company to invest in so much infrastructure to cover all of the land.

Franchise agreements aren't exclusionary. They just lay out what a company will pay to the city for the right to use the public right of way. They also cover things like in-kind contributions for schools and libraries and minimum service levels (which set out that they can't cherry pick neighborhoods and must offer service to everyone in a geographic area). A second provider would have to agree to conditions at least equal to the first one.

I worked for a city-owned electric utility that would regularly negotiate with outside entities to do pole-attachments. We did fiber loops around the city and started to offer Internet service. When it looked like we might actually make some meaningful progress, Bellsouth and Cox went to the state government and got a law passed that forbade ANY governmental organization or political subdivision from getting into the telecomm business.

If we had the national political will to insist on a competitive telecommunications infrastructure, we'd have one. I'm happy to see that some ISPs are giving it a go. Unfortunately, the capital costs are so high that it's hard for an upstart to really gain traction.

Our best bet for a truly competitive marketplace is for the CableCos to finally get into the business of doing SMB (small/medium biz) customer service that gives the ATT/Verizons a run for their money.

That is not necessarily true.

In Florida, prior to the deployment of Fios, as a competitor to cable television, Verizon lobbied the Florida legislature to rescind the minimum service level requirements to offer television to all citizens.

As a result, there are random neighborhoods with Fios access and others without. Verizon cherry picked the neighborhoods it wanted to service.

As you pointed out, the real problem seems to be the politicians.

Like I said, franchise agreements are hardly uniform and the large telcos can often muscle the politicians to doing things their way. Add in tax revenue promises and other inducements to side with the telcos and it's easy to see where the loyalties of our elected officials lie.

I wish it was different but telecom market domination is close to network neutrality in being out on the minds of the citizenry. Unless you can connect it to jobs or taxes, it's unlikely to interest any outside of a select few.

And even more sadly, it's not the "entire area." I've seen too many folks get stuck on the edge of a county line and end up serviced by neither of two providers due to their weird geographical location.

That's what they said with the railroads. They should have said: fine, don't.

But politicians are short-sighted.