Dwindling demand for what? Broadband? There was a natural upgrade path for DSL: push the fiber network closer and closer to the premises, eventually building FTTN with VDSL2 to the premises. That'd support 100 megabit service. Nobody did it, because who wants to spend billions building infrastructure for your competitors?
Of course, here in the UK, in a lot of places, we have just that - FTTC with VDSL to the home, which a number of companies share. Less common in rural places, of course, but in cities and even a number of towns it can be hard to find places that don't have it now.
We have a single company (BT Openreach) that's highly regulated by Ofcom which lays said cables and owns the relevant last mile infrastructure. This company then sells access to said infrastructure to retail ISPs.
Ofcom has enough teeth to force this company to perform upgrades, through both Government-based power, and the fact that because if the company didn't, the retail ISPs could reasonably band together and lay their own cables (at significant cost and likely regulatory nightmares, but they could certainly tear into Openreach's margins). There's a couple of companies which already do that on their own; Virgin is one, I believe, and it's trying to follow the US "media company" model.
So basically: we have a model in which we've managed to allow for a single company to exist without competition because that's the most efficient way to manage national physical infrastructure, but there's enough regulations and threats floating about that it more-or-less does what its customers (the retail ISPs) want, which in turn more-or-less do what their customers (Internet users) want due to competition. That is, we've built a system in which there's enough money floating around to potentially replace Openreach if we really, really had to.
The difference is that BT was a government owned corporation, and when it was privatized, the government: 1) gave notice to Investors who bought the stock; 2) created a cost recovery and profit scheme for the company; 3) wrote that scheme into the prospectus for the share sales.
A slight nitpick: BT was privatised in 1984 - what they did get was a strong regulator in the form of Oftel (now Ofcom) - it was Oftel who made BT offer Local Loop Unbundling (in general policy in 1999 and specifically as part of BT's license in 2000):
Which is precisely why we need infrastructure companies and service provider companies and never the twain shall they meet. Frankly local governments should contract out to a company to lay fiber all over the place to each house and then provide a local hosting center where service companies can put their equipment and connect to the fiber. Comcast wants to connect to x number of people? Fine. Verizon wants to connect to xx number of people? Okay. Mom and Pop Internet Co. has a couple dozen customers? Open Access! Fiber's tiny, you could lay enough strands to each house that each provider could connect to one. Infrastructure company not living up to their end of the bargain? Not being responsive to outages and such? Kick them out on their asses and get a new one. Other than setting up the relationships and policing for abuse the local government can just stay out of it.
We had a time when a company spent billions of dollars building infrastructure for their competitors. We've never had as good competition since that time, the dial-up days.
If you want to go that route then you're going to have to find billions of dollars in cash to pay the contractors laying the fiber. Good luck with that.
Voters love tax increases and municipal debt so raising the money should be easy compared to finding enough qualified contractors for a large scale project like this.
That's ridiculous. Who's going to do the work? Not government workers. Who's going to provide the services? Not the government. The funds would be raised the same way as any other corporate project. The only difference is separation of the infrastructure providers from the service providers. Service providers will pay the infrastructure providers for access to the connections to their customers. That's how it will be paid for. Startup fees could be in the form of bonds that could be paid back over time. Hell, some companies would probably buy in just for an equal chance to compete with Comcast or Verizon in a given area.
Look, we own the roads. Not Ford, not Chevrolet, not Toyota. In some places the roads are not in great shape because the money isn't being spent where it should to keep it up. That is a government problem but it's mostly a lazy voter problem. There are people that argue less government is the solution to our problems when they're too lazy to hold the government accountable for misappropriating money and giving kickbacks to their corporate friends and future employers. Despite the problems, it's still better than having all of the roads owned by Ford and then anyone who wants to drive a Toyota on those roads has to pay a huge "wrong car" tax.. I mean fee.. or drive at half the speed or something else ridiculous. (you could call it road neutrality) I'm not even suggesting we should own the network. I'm not even saying we should "own" the dark fiber to each house. I'm suggesting we should make it so competition can flourish instead of being choked off.
You're not going to have it by making companies build out brand new infrastructure for every company. Completely eliminate all other barriers other than buying the lines and putting them up. That's still tons of money, even for a small area. In the old days a mom & pop ISP could start up by ordering a T1 and a few phone lines from the phone company. The phone company was the infrastructure. If there are 30 companies that want to offer service to a city do you propose all 30 build out some sort of cabling all over town? Don't be ridiculous. Can you imagine? Then most of them go out of business because there's not enough of a market to sustain that and billions of dollars sit rotting on the poles instead of being used for a good purpose.
I'm telling you. Fiber to the home with a colocation facility or facilities that they all run to. Put several strands so if someone wants to buy Fiber TV from Comcast, Fiber phone from Verizon and Fiber Internet from whoever else each company can have their own lines. Or hell, if they want all 3 from Comcast then they can just use 1 fiber line. If you get Internet from Mom & pop co and they go out of business then you can switch providers by subscribing to a new one and they will do what they need to in the colocation to move your fiber over to their system.
The only role in the government is, as the representative of the customers who are requesting the service, to set up relationships and take action when there's abuse such as price fixing or if the infrastructure company turns out to be a bunch of deadbeats.
Nobody is going to voluntarily build an infrastructure only company. It's a chicken and egg scenario, what use is it if no one is offering a service over it? What use is a service without the infrastructure to support it?
As an aside, If your only concern as a voter is how low your taxes are then you're part of the problem, not the solution. You should be concerned about what value your taxes are bringing you. You could be paying less taxes but much much more in other areas as a result. You'll never be able to pay as low taxes as the guy who can afford to make sure he's paying the lowest taxes.
A situation where nobody wants to invest in DSL and everyone is looking to get out of the wireline telephone business?