> Massive swaths of the US required government action to get telephone and electric service.

In the UK, British Telecom had plans to roll out what we'd now call "Fibre To The Premises", offering digital communications at maybe as much as 256kbps, multiple telephone lines, and even Video-on-Demand, by the middle of the 1980s across the whole country starting with rural areas.

However, it was smashed up and sold off in bits by the rapacious Conservative government in 1984. Now where I live is on track to get BT fibre - or fibre of any sort really - by 2034.

Telephone and data is an interesting one. It's an area that on its face is a natural monopoly, but in much of the US we ended up with two telecom providers

Telephone was a monopoly because it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business. But, all that wire could carry until the 90s was a voice call

Likewise, in the 60s/70s/80s cable TV became a thing but it didn't make sense to have more than one TV wire to every house, because it already has all the TV you can get, and at the time all it could carry was video channels

In the 90s these networks converged: when everything is digital, a network carrying digital signals can carry any kind of data

So, in urbanized and suburban areas we largely have a competitive market in what would otherwise be a natural monopoly. The problem is, because it's competitive in like 80-90% of the country everyone's been relieved of their universal service obligations (which applied only to voice service anyway) so there's been little incentive to expand into more rural and underserved areas

In Sweden there are many cities where the infrastructure (dark fiber to the premises) is publicly owned, but the public infrastructure owner offers no end-user service. Instead, internet service for end users is an open market where everyone uses the public infrastructure. It works really well and is really cheap for the consumers.

> it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business.

Not necessarily so. In cities it is quite normal to run 2-4 optic fibers to most buildings; my building in Brooklyn has 2 different fibers and a cable link. Equally, there are 2-3 national mobile providers which cover most of the entire US.

In the suburbia this breaks, or course.

Wireless is much different, one physical piece of infrastructure covers a wide area, vs. wireline requires touching literally every location along the route. The economics are very different

It's why at one point we had 4 satellite TV options in the US at one time (C-Band, Primestar, DirecTV, and Dish Network all existed at the same time) but in 98% of the US there was only ever one cable company (some small cable companies did try to overbuild but it was and is extremely rare) and certainly only ever one landline phone company

And in terms of overall cost for society, is that actually a good thing? It's not like they are actually providing much redundancy. If one breaks (cut during some construction in the street), the other one likely does too. The resources used to put those redundant cables in could have been used better for other things.

I'm always bamboozled by prices of internet around the US and that there is a data limit one can upload or download. Perfect example of this milking while making service worse over time.

Other than the very early days of dial-up (where there were monthly limits on connect hours), my internet has always been without limit. Whether some form of dialup (POTS, ISDN, POTS with MLPPP), or DSL, VDSL, DOCSIS, or even LTE: I use what I want and the connection never slows down, and the bill stays the same.

There's an ISP that has completed a buried fiber rollout in my neighborhood as of a few days ago. I'll get plugged into that soon-enough; I got a card in the mail that says it's time to give them a call to schedule an install.

The price has stayed ~about the same over time for broadband; I've always paid about 50 bucks per month for always-on broadband. Sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less, but right around 50 bucks anyway. If I were to chart it with an inflation adjustment then the price would be trending downward.

Speeds, meanwhile: They trend upward. Quality of services improves.

A quarter of a century ago, my 860/160kbps DSL used to go down every morning promptly at 0200, stay down for about 10 minutes, and then come back with a different dynamic IP, and I was frequently on the phone with them about some issue or other.

The 500/20Mbps DOCSIS I have today is solid-enough that I can't think of any aspect worthy of complaint, and I've only made one phone call about it in the past 6 years.

I've always lived in the US. Am I doing it wrong?

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edit: The new fiber provider actually just called me. I signed up for 500/500 fiber for... 50 bucks per month, and they'll install it tomorrow afternoon. The price trend continues.

just about every provider of any significance has dropped data caps in the US. Once fiber hit a critical mass, the cable companies dropped their limits

That's good. I vaguely remember when some isps in US when streaming services introduced basically throttling if you were "streaming video too much". How much do you pay per month? I have an European perspective but I understand that there is much less remote places and far higher competition.