In reality none is preventing competition it's just none is really competing.
I'd recommend you read up on municipal broadband, and the war the telecoms have waged against communities doing an end run around their shoddy and expensive service.
Likewise, look at the hoops they've forced Google to jump through to achieve even modest fiber rollouts. Google is among the biggest companies in the world. The only thing saving Google Fiber is that they are not some scrappy startup, but one of the most powerful companies in the world; without that power and economic clout, they would die a horrible death at the hands of AT&T's attorneys and pet legislators, as nearly every one of the thousands of independent ISPs did in the 90s and early 2000s.
Innovation in consumer internet service has been thoroughly strangled by the telecoms and cable companies. They've divided up the turf, come to some gentleman's agreements with each other about pricing and access, and now we're all just here to feed the cash cow. If ever there was a classic case of collusion (and, hell, I might even call it racketeering) among modern "legitimate" businesses, the telecom and cable business is it.
If you believe the lack of innovation and poor service is merely that no one is "competing", I'd encourage you to give that market a go. There's no competition, after all. It should be easy, right?
What "hoops" have companies forced Google to jump through to achieve Fiber rollout? Almost all the resistance to Google Fiber has been from municipalities that are not willing to waive build-out requirements, which Google demands as part of the package of "fast track" permitting necessary to be a fiber city.
Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
> The investment per connection of a full fiber access line to the home replacing all copper or coax is between 850 and 1100 Euro (1,143-1,479 USD) in the Netherlands, all-included. The equivalent number in the USA as quoted by Verizon is in the same ballpark per home connected.
> But wouldn’t the investment level of the access line be elevated by the fact that fiber cabling is used? That appears to be not the case. The investment in access infrastructure, i.e., stringing or digging new cables, consists mainly of labor, not materials (exceptional conditions excluded). In dense cities, the bill of materials is as low as 20 percent.
Also, not having a monopoly makes it expensive: http://www.videonuze.com/article/google-s-fiber-to-the-home-...
It cost Verizon about $1,000 to pass each house, and $500 to hook up a house that's already passed. But in areas with competition from cable, at best they can hope to get 30-40% of houses they pass to subscribe. So you pass three houses to connect one (3 x $1,000 + $500 = $3,500). And that's for the company that is in many places the wireline incumbent.