This post will go out after my city holds a vote on a small sales tax increase to fund some deferred road maintenance.
The city's presentation on the matter presents the increase as a measure to "stop the bleeding" on the road condition in our town. The tax increase, paired with a bond or two, will enable the city to repair the roads in the worst condition on a triage basis and do some preventative maintenance and conditioning on roads that aren't in "bad" condition yet, so as to keep them in good condition longer.
The funds are also going to be used to work on water lines that are under the roads (because while you're ripping the roads up, you may as well) and bicycle and pedestrian safety implements and programs, which I think is a good thing.
Fortunately for this proposition, I suspect most people in my town (indeed, in the United States at large) acknowledge that the roads are a very important piece of public infrastructure. Roads are used by the smallest of children riding school buses to school all the way up to adults of all types going places, older children who are walking around, businesses moving goods around, the public transportation system, and all sorts of other things.
I don't know the background of how our road system got to the state it is in today, but the city and the public acknowledges that this is a bad thing and work together on resolving the problem by raising some money (with a tax hike) and funding the maintenance to improve the roads.
When a city, county, and state have properly maintained and functioning roads, traffic over the road system can flow more efficiently and people who use the roads' other functionality (bike lanes, pedestrian sidewalks, etc) can efficiently and safely move. Public and private services (the public transit agency, Grayhound, United States Postal Services, FedEx, UPS, just as a few examples) can effectively provide competitive services using the road, and can do so without paying anything special to use the roads.
Unfortunately, it seems like this concept hasn't (and, who knows, may not in the reasonably near future) translate over to Internet services. Many people seem to think that the solution to a "fixed" high speed Internet access system in the United States is to introduce or talk about competition. I get where they're coming from, but I can't think of a single situation in the United States where competing privately-owned roads has created any kind of benefit to "customers" (in this case, both motorists and customers of services that use roads, such as delivery services.) Because roads are an obvious "natural monopoly" (building a duplicate road system is costly and physically impractical,) nobody thinks about building a second set of roads in order to have the two road operators compete on efficiency, maintenance levels, comfort, and/or profits.
The only "competition" we have in the broadband market in the United States really came about because our country is too physically large for over the air television signals to be completely practical – cable access television systems were installed (well after phone systems,) for the purpose giving distant neighborhoods access to big-city television programming. Fast forward to the 1990s and it's clear that data networking and home level access to the Internet is the Next Big Thing™ and because both the telephone company and cable TV company had wires strung everywhere, competing technologies were developed to enable both the cable TV provider and the telephone provider to sell data access over those physical systems.
Today, a third competitor has appeared in the form of wireless – by and large originally intended for use as a telephone system, different wireless technologies has enabled both small local outfits and incumbent phone carriers to provide high speed Internet access to homes and mobile users mostly nationwide.
Today, as the throughput needs of both sets of systems increases, and as we move more services (such as phones and the cable company's video on demand systems) onto the Internet, the best strategy for providers using both of these systems (largely classified as "The Telco" and "The Cableco," though there are telcos that exist that were previously using cable systems, and many telcos now sell TV over their lines) has been to increase the use of fiber networking equipment. This process has been thought of as pushing faster speeds to equipment closer to homes. On the telco side of things, what this results in is systems like AT&T's U-Verse or CenturyLink's Fiber to the Neighborhood deployments where there will be a fiber endpoint within a few thousand wire feet of your home, and DSL will carry a "pretty fast" network connection from that termination point to your home. Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber (and to a lesser extent, AT&T and CenturyLink) are deploying fiber directly to the side of homes. On the cableco side of things, I honestly don't know the details of how this manifests itself. I believe the cableco runs fiber to a similar distribution point, thus reducing the number of customers receiving a specific signal.
A solution that gets proposed from time to time is to build out fiber networks at the city, state, or even federal level, deploy them equally to all premises in the United States, and then allow any Internet, phone, or television provider to compete using those physical lines. It's an interesting idea, but if you ask customers of DSL Extreme and Sonic.net how well line sharing with AT&T and Verizon works, it does, sort of, unless you need the incumbent to do something with the lines.
As I've mentioned, I personally think that in the way that the city manages the roads up to your driveway, the city/state/federal data networking organization (American Bell?) should provide you with a connection right to the Internet, along with some kind of callable telephone identity. (It doesn't have to be a standard American ten-digit phone number, I presume the service would be associated with some kind of city/state/federal e-mail account, so maybe a SIP identity based on your street address or some other information) and allow cable TV companies access to local datacenters to put high-bandwidth video signals onto the network as close to the customer as possible.
In such a system, any other ISP would be able to set up a PPPoE or VPN server in those datacenters and provide access to their backhaul, but I am unconvinced that the profit model for "internet companies" should be bases exclusively on access to the Internet itself, and I think that we'd see more competition in terms of stuff like online storage services, e-mail services that allow certain domains or have very high usage quotas (and maybe bulk mailing functionality for people who run small businesses), as well as competition in the audio/video content scenes.
Ideally, simplifying the structure of last-mile Internet delivery would also improve the situation for, say, Netflix and similar companies trying to do a lot of business with customers on the Internet.
As to the wireless suggestion, I have always thought that wireless and wired network access should be complementary products. I don't think that universal wireless access should be mandatory at this point in time, although rate controls or profit caps that get used to force rates down or force the companies to invest in improving their deployments and products (in the style of old pre-deregulation, pre-breakup Bell system) would be helpful.
To add to wireless, I don't know what makes me think of wireless and wireline in such different ways. Right now I think part of it is reach and access. You choose T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint (or an MVNO or regional carrier) based on where their signals reach. It's difficult to regulate that to the specificity of "each doorstep should have this level of performance" in a wireless environment, whereas when you're mandating at a federal level that everybody needs a specific speed to be deployed in a pretty specific manner, and you can guarantee that performance because it's fiber optics, then the environment of each is a little difference.
One way to side-step the issue is to say that "American Bell" is running the universal American cellular network, and that your phone's SIM chip will tell the network whose data paths to use. The idea behind that would be that the American public as a whole as well as all of the cell phone companies are paying into running and maintaining the best possible wireless network, and your choice of which "carrier" to use is really based on reasons other than physical access to signals.
The question is whether or not this would cause these entities to coalesce simply because there's no good way to compete when that's the environment. So, if you let them run their own networks and choose their own technologies (not, of course, that CDMA as a concept is really going to live on for too much longer, and at this point it's not just a matter of who has which LTE frequencies) then they can hypothetically derive competitive value based on the spectrum and how each of them deploys towers.
Unfortunately for wireless carriers, there are so many factors that go into a wireless deployment, and propping up new towers is the kind of thing that always invites a hearty "not in my backyard. In fact, one of the wireless carriers that has traditionally struggled to find sites for cell towers in my town has got one coming online relatively soon. I would say "finally," but I'm aware of this particular carrier's struggle to add more capacity for town, and at the same time that most of its customers complain and threaten to jump ship, it receives feedback like "I don't want to have to teach children what a cell tower is" from the Montessori school when it picks out not its first or second but seventh or eighth proposed location for a cell tower.
So, on the Internet front, working with these infrastructure providers to allow them reasonable access to the town so they can wire or fiber it up is definitely necessary. I'd like to believe that through some miraculous public/private cooperation we can get better connectivity without needing to forcefully acquire the company or start a new one, but it works so rarely here in the United States, and we definitely destroyed what little public/private cooperation we had going on with the phone company in 1984 when the divestiture was forced.