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In Austria there's a law (might be an EU regulation) that requires the formerly state-owned phone company to rent the "last mile" cables to other companies. Made internet a lot cheaper (16Mbit ADSL costs around 25€ per month).

However, for some reason, private cable companies do not need to share their infrastructure, so if you want faster Internet you are still stuck with the local cable company.

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this is called local-loop unbundling. there are various "hysterical raisins" (aka historical reasons) that cable companies are exempt from this regulatory requirement. the main one being their infrastructure was not publicly funded at any time (ignoring tax breaks and a bevy of other direct/indirect public subsidies)

there is also BSA or bitstream access where, in the case of DSL, the ATM circuit is provisioned and carried by the incumbent and then handed off to the competitive provider in a central location. of course, this isn't all that useful since it's still the incumbent who has to provision the circuit, maintain the copper and equipment, and generally muck up the customer experience despite not being the labelled provider.

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