The market gave me my first alternative in my apartment.
10 mbps uncapped already back in year 2000 for only $23.4 / month. By "Bredbandsbolaget" and ethernet, but it was very unusual and this was the first place in the nation.
The copper telephone network has been made by the government / their telephone company, that offered various DSL services. I'm not hooked up there but that would be another alternative.
By now there's also the cellular network of course. I don't know how many network constructionists we have because we have more cellular companies who rents capacity on those networks / use them for their services. Maybe there's 4-5 networks at-least to pick among.
Since I live in an apartment it's sure through the one who own the apartment which happen to be the municipality but regardless it's connected to cable TV. The cable TV company offer Internet through their network.
Finally and most importantly really the apartment is connected to the dark municipal network which have .. 10? different providers of capacity, and yeah, even my summer home which I'm never at can be connected to that thanks to EU which has granted money for building such networks to rural locations.
So as you know I've got lots of options, my mother out on the country side would just have copper/DSL and cellular network connection to pick from I think.
At one time back in the DSL days there was also talk about hooking people up through the power cables. And about at that time together with cable TV the idea of building a governmental network to hook everyone up died.
If you're doing it without the market IMHO the right thing to do is it what has been done here - build the infrastructure in the way of digging down the cables and then let others offer their services on them. I guess that also solve the issue with people in rural areas not being connected otherwise. If you let the market do it then you just have to move to a place where the market has felt it was worth to hook people up.. But with multiple providers which a cross-over of capacity which own their own networks and don't share you're of course over-spending on the infrastructure but on the other hand I guess they could had agreed on sharing too.
Sure the money ends up in Poland but on the other hand the reason it's cheaper there is most likely because they are poorer and work for lower salaries and pay less in rent and have cheaper land and .. Also it's not necessarily like you actually lose on giving them money if that give you cheaper items.
Protectionism is pretty stupid. Why grow tomatoes in Sweden and buy a Spanish truck when you can buy tomatoes from Spain and get a Swedish-made truck instead?
At-least if one actually do hate inequality between nations and that some are born more poor then others why care about jobs, spending and improvements happening mostly in poor countries?
