The Oz model.
I rather like the way the Aust. model seems to be headed.
The Govt. will start a private company that will use Tax payers money to fund FTTH. The Govt. intends holding a 50% shareholding in said company.
For the existing telcos to gain a slice of the remaining 50% they must kick in network resources. For instance, Telstra the post privatised telco are being urged to toss in some existing cables, conduits, trunk routes etc., Optus, their existing cable network or part thereof. In return they get shares in the new company. You get the picture.
As time goes by, it's expected that the debt to the taxpayer will be paid off from profits (the new company is strictly a wholesaler), at that point the govt. will withdraw from the company and sell its shares.
It's an interesting proposition and if done properly will work (it remains to be seen if a Govt. can ever make it work).
The aim of the exercise is to get fibre to approx 99% of homes with the balance served by mobile phone telcos and two way satellite (hopefully with reasonable speed and large caps).
The major reason for doing it this way is, after privatising telstra we ended up with a private company monopoly that could pretty much do as it wished, much the same as happened in UK with BT.
To break that monopoly would cost the govt. a fortune in compensation to Telstra.
Doing it this way Telstra have a choice, give the new company network assets and become a part of the fibre to the home business, or, stay out of it and do their own thing , very risky, most homes will have a fibre and a copper line and Telstra would have to pay the wholesaler for access to the fibre.
There is also talk of Telstra and others having to give up shares of the satellite/cable tv business to qualify for 'admission' into the new company, the reason being that they can't then do as suggested by a poster above, reserve bandwidth for the cable/internet TV customers at the expense of general internet users.
Yes, this still means that the taxpayer will subsidise the rural user. But, if it works, it will, in the end cost the taxpayer nothing. (That's the hope anyway).