What you get from competition is the incentive to lay down fiber optics, so that you attract customers with your higher speeds and can rent the infrastructure to your competition. Though there are other forces at work in urban areas, in my area I know a lot of people out in the 'burbs with fiber optics while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best. Not sure what's happening there, and I imagine is where municipal internet can help (with both the taxpayer dollars and bipartisan buy-in for it).

On the customer service front, the painpoint is usually related to mobile networks. It's very painful to switch from one carrier to another, with limited time offers to keep you or upselling when you've decided to join. It's when this spills over into their internet services that I want to get off the grid entirely.

From your post, it seems the European internet and mobile market is much more competitive than the US one. And yet much more regulated. It seems that’s two markets where EU regulations have actually created both enough competition (still not a lot of providers, 3, 4 everywhere) and constraints on the licensees to give us cheap very high speed fiber and painless mobile switch (number portability). Is your city dense? It’s so weird that the center would be left out of fiber when generally that’s where carriers prefer to lay it first.

>while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best

If you're in the U.S. probably exclusive provider revenue share agreements with apartment buildings. The ISP gets exclusive access to the building and the building owner gets a % of ISP revenue.

Anecdotally, that rev share can be tens of thousands a year.