Well, I am from Germany.

We had a monopoly here, allowing ONLY German Telekom (then called 
Bundespost) to do business in the field of communications. GT was a part of 
the German state - a federal office - and all employees were civil servants, 
starting at the top management down to the guy digging up the street and 
placing the cables there. It was the same with postal services.

Now, don't confuse a US civil servant with a German one - our's don't pay 
income tax and get lots of money compared to a normal worker - if you deduct 
the taxes, social security and "Abgaben" - there is no real term for this in 
English, it is another kind of tax in every sense but the legal one. It is 
said the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow - we Germans have 50 
different words for tax - but I disgress.

The monopoly had a rather severe impact on German online-services and BBS in 
the 80's and 90's. You could only have a modem if it had the approval seal 
of the GT. So a 56kbps modem that could be had for 50 dollars in the US was 
sold by our bureaucrats for the equivalent of 500 dollars. Much cost for a 
little sticker on the back of the modem. So either you were rich or used 
illegally imported modems - or did not use modems at all, which most people 
did. Hey, you even had to rent the actual phone from the GT in addition to 
paying monthly for the line itself.

Find the old phones you had to rent here: actually these were quite hip at 
the time.

http://schnitzler-aachen.de/Surftipps/Bundespost_1984_b.jpg

The standard model was mouse-grey platics with a dial. We had, at more 
monthly cost, a green phone with dial. We used it until 1996. See a similar 
phone below:

http://www.2blum.de/images/FeTAp611-2a.jpg

Now, I think it was a blessing when the Bundespost had to give up the 
monopoly. However, I think it would be fair to grant a time-limited monopoly 
on their own cables for any telco which actually digs up the ground and puts 
IT-infrastructure in. Whoever pays for the new cables could be sure to reap 
the profits. This way VDSL would spread into rural Germany much faster.

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