We need some more Telecom competition here in the US to improve their services. I live in San Francisco and I've been waiting for a good while now for webpass to become an option in my building. Comcast service is really subpar. Meanwhile all my friends in northern europe have crazy gigabit connections.
> We need some more Telecom competition here in the US to improve their services
The US tried that and it didn't work. Specifically, The US Justice Dept broke up AT&T into a bunch of "Baby Bells", which spent hundreds of billions of dollars on takeovers to reassemble themselves into AT&T.
In brief: Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) merged with Pacific Telesis, then SBC bought Ameritech, then it bought AT&T and renamed itself... AT&T. Then the new AT&T bought Cingular. Consumers paid heavily for this, and got no real benefits.
The obvious answer is to make broadband a "social good" like highways, schools, the judicial system and (in rational countries) healthcare, and build it out in the same way as Al Gore's dad built the US interstate highway system after WW2.
Unfortunately, that can't happen in the US, because politics.
Under the US healthcare system, Americans pay 2x to 3x more than the OECD average, suffer much higher rates of infant mortality, have far more sickness in the over 65s, and die younger.
Without the concept of a "social good", you'd expect the US telecoms/broadband industry to produce similar results.
Crappy broadband causes a massive loss in productivity and makes the US less competitive with many small countries, but I don't expect those costs are factored into anybody's calculations.
I never understood the point of splitting up AT&T geographically. Were they expecting turf wars to explode on the borders between them?
In some European countries, when the former telco monopolies were split, they were split vertically - so there was one "copper company", then the phone service company, etc. The copper company would generally be heavily regulation with local loop unbundling, requirements to be fair to anyone who wants to sell service over the network, etc.
The big deal was the vertical split between local (baby bells) an long distance (at&t). It then became possible to easily switch your long distance carrier, which lead to intense competition and lower prices. Local exchange service remained a monopoly, but most jurisdictions had fairly strict tariffs for rates. Later, the telecom act of 1996 opened up to competitive exchange carriers using the existing lines and buildings; would have been nice if the FCC had enforced that for internet too :(
