[ap-andersson]

It works when the company that takes care of the fiber is owned by the city and have more goals than to make money. Just like the company that create the electricity grid. When they have goals both in terms of how many people they reach with fiber within the area aswell as making money. Then you have a way of creating fiber and an open market where any ISPs can connect to the city-wide or region-wide fiber network and sell their services. Instead of competing in regards to the physical network close to the customer they compete when it comes to redundant connections to the city, quality customer support, prices, public IPs etc. This model is used all over Sweden (and I assume other countries in europe) to provide affordable internet. There are ofcourse still areas here that are only served by a single ISP with their own network. Often there can be a combination of those monopoloy networks and open networks within a single city. Depending on when the houses where built and who the estate owner is etc. Its sometimes cheaper for a smaller estate owner to sign with a single ISP since the initial installation cost may be lower. The end customer will of course pay higher prices for the services going forward.

The electricity works the same. One company owned by the city builds the electricity infrastructure. Then you pick whatever company you want to buy the electricity from.

I can pick between 10+ companies for Internet and many more than that for electricity in my town of around 60k residents.

Works fine as long as the company that takes care of that part does its job. You do put all trust in that one company to not be a douchebag. But seems to work here. Does of course not mean that it will work everywhere.

edit: Seems to work in some parts of the US aswell: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/open-infra-inc-got-i...

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2021/10/19/open-access-fiber-net...

An old PDF with some interesting facts, even if they are outdates by now: https://www.ssnf.org/globalassets/in-english/facts-and-stati...