Dunno, having an actor to oversee the behavior of telecoms would be an advantage, not the opposite.
In our neighborhood, we're waiting on Spectrum to finish their infrastructure install. We were initially in talks with AT&T to come in too, but they backed out when we couldn't do community agreements (beyond easement) again and we wouldn't agree to them using the existing infrastructure (which was terrible) from the previous provider below. No other provider, asides from HughesNet, is willing to come in now that there is a non-exclusive agreement with Spectrum for easement access. Moral of the story, companies aren't going to act with consumers' interests at heart. Didn't Charter or someone have some agreement where part of some merger approval required that they built out into rural areas? A requirement they didn't comply with?
The provider we had before was absolutely terrible with $90/month spent on a basic DishTV package + 3Mbps internet. They had an exclusive easement, but due to constant outages because the infrastructure couldn't support the community, we were able to finally get out of it after 6 years and lots of lawyer involvement. FCC wouldn't get involved, but having the government take a more active oversight role would be a good thing, in my experience.
The fact that no provider will serve this neighborhood without exclusivity is contingent upon the woeful state of telecom competition in USA. If it were regulated like e.g. automobiles (basic requirements, but nothing about a particular vendor "owning" some portion of the market or the road), then you'd have a choice of WISPs. You might not get a wired connection, depending on density etc. As you can see from the European contributions to this thread, wireless can actually be very good. If the neighbors wanted to go in together for a really big fat wireless connection in higher portions of the spectrum, the "last block" could still be wired. That would be an easy upgrade to fiber once that made sense. Market forces would still govern that deal, because of those WISPs.
In our neighborhood, we're waiting on Spectrum to finish their infrastructure install. We were initially in talks with AT&T to come in too, but they backed out when we couldn't do community agreements (beyond easement) again and we wouldn't agree to them using the existing infrastructure (which was terrible) from the previous provider below. No other provider, asides from HughesNet, is willing to come in now that there is a non-exclusive agreement with Spectrum for easement access. Moral of the story, companies aren't going to act with consumers' interests at heart. Didn't Charter or someone have some agreement where part of some merger approval required that they built out into rural areas? A requirement they didn't comply with?
The provider we had before was absolutely terrible with $90/month spent on a basic DishTV package + 3Mbps internet. They had an exclusive easement, but due to constant outages because the infrastructure couldn't support the community, we were able to finally get out of it after 6 years and lots of lawyer involvement. FCC wouldn't get involved, but having the government take a more active oversight role would be a good thing, in my experience.