When I went to pick out an ISP, I was astounded when I finally figured out that every single one of them is forced to rent the copper from the same company (Telstra), who takes its sweet time sending out technicians to the tune of 10-20 working days to get internet service up & running. Can you imagine the rioting if that were a utility like water or electricity? What's worse is that the ISP, who has zero control over it, gets the blame for the delay.

To my understanding, it went something like this:

AU Govt: "Let's privatize all of our telecoms infrastructure.... what's that? Give it all to a single company, creating a de-facto monopoly and ensuring mediocre service, lack of upgrades, and the stifling of competition for years hence? What a capital idea!"

I would love to out the politicians whose pockets got lined by that move.

The issue there is that it is extremely difficult for a private organisation without existing cable assets to deploy a new fibre network.

Land access, easement issues, pit access/location/sharing and so on are very difficult problems with no single solution.

Private industry wouldn't be able to take the risk.

Not to mention that the second the big telcos (read: Telstra) got wind of someone trying to compete, they'd use regulatory capture and other dirty tricks to ensure that the newcomer had a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.

Your surprise is because you're a relatively recent arrival to Australia. :) The broadband market here has been stagnant for over a decade due to the failure of the competitive market to improve anything.

You do realize this is one of the problems the NBN is trying to solve, right?

The problem with a competitive market as applied to public utilities is that there is only 1 set of infrastructure. So either 1 player owns the infrastructure and provides the service, the current regime, or you break out owning the infrastructure and providing the service.

The plan with the NBN is that NBNCo will own the infrastructure and then lease last-mile connections to whomever that specific customer chose as their ISP.