Do you mean like the railways, or the water industry or perhaps the electricity. No? The gas then. Hiving off the core network doesn’t work unless it’s government controlled. The operating companies whinge and whine that the core charges them too much for service, and ALWAYS blames them for all delays or problems. The government thus imposes cost controls on the core which causes a further cut in service provion and greater reductions in infrastructure.
You can’t have completion in utility provision, because no one is going to provide a universal competing network let alone several companies. If you have free completion you end up with the profitable bits, ie cities with densly packed populaces having multiple providers and sparsely populated regions having reduced or none existent service. Ask an American in the wilds of Alaska what broadband speed they get.
As for Virgin, just where have they spent their money providing networks? That’ll be the cities.
Even the mobile operators share infrastructure outside of the big cities as it’s just not viable to provide their own.
How many villages are there with no gas, even close to populated areas? Do you have mains gas?
As I say, I am desperately sorry that you are suffering problems, and that the organisation can’t sort it out, it really shouldn’t be difficult, but believe me it is. But I also KNOW that the only way to improve service and rollout new technologies in a timely way is for all the utilities to be single entities controlled by the government. If you a cite one single country in the world where true free enterprise provision of utilities has resulted in a universal service of world leading technologies I’d really really like to know.
Oh, and you mention the government paying BT to provide fibre roll out to sparsely populated areas. That was put out to private tender, and In the last round only BT actually put a bid in to do the work and I suspect even then it was reluctantly. It costs a lot of money and is hard to provide firbe coverage.
You have some very valid points, but my main gripe with them wasn't about the difficulty of providing a rural service, it was the appalling customer service, arrogance, and complete disinterest as to whether they bothered to turn up for a scheduled appointment. They just did not care, and never, ever, responded to any of my nine complaints until I emailed the CEO of Openreach. That is easily fixable by sacking the people concerned, and hiring some who have experience in a company that "does" customer service. All of the other firms that I was involved with on my house move did what they were supposed to, on the day they were supposed to, BT/Openreach were the only failures. (I'm leaving out the succession of house owners who repeatedly lied to us about actually moving out, as they aren't companies.
As for Virgin, yes, it wasn't as rural as where we are now, it was about 8 miles from a city, in a village, and they provided the complete infrastructure. And no, we don't have mains gas here, or even mains water. The European and Welsh Govts paid for the fibre infrastructure, which was done, the bit where it failed was the easy bit of getting the fibre a whole 15 metres from the pole to my house. They wasted so much manpower by assorted engineers turning up at random with no idea why they were there, it would have been so much easier just to have the one guy turn up at the scheduled time and do the job. That is just incompetence, and very sad, as its an insult to the engineers who did their best.