Some scrappy company comes in saying they can offer 10gb fiber for the same price or less, but it takes an infrastructure upgrade. The consortium of incumbents shoot down the idea because it will “cause problems” or whatever. So they’re never forced to spend money to upgrade the shared tech, and your service never improves.

I don’t doubt it. But do you have any examples of this having ever happened? Every case I’m aware of has gone much like the person your replying to describes.

For example, I moved to England and spent the better part of ten years trying to get British Telecom to install a working telephone and internet connection at a house in the center of a large town. They’d send a truck out a few times a year to fix the same line fault, which consisted of having a guy climb a pole, unplug somebody else’s house from the “good” connection, and plug them into one of the bad ones. Presumably that neighbor would get the truck to come back at some point, starting the cycle again.

There are no other providers. Or rather, the other providers all subcontract from BT, so you eventually get the same truck to come out. But now you’ve added another layer of pain to the equation.

If there were a second option, they would get all the business. But there is not, so you’re stuck with what you’re given.

Yes, there are whole Wikipedia lists of this having ever happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbank_network

This is no rocket science. I mean, even utilities grids in open markets work like this, for stuff like power and even gas. Nowadays even railway networks in Europe are decoupled from operators. Why do people still cling to old monopoly tales?