alt Hacker News> it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business.
Not necessarily so. In cities it is quite normal to run 2-4 optic fibers to most buildings; my building in Brooklyn has 2 different fibers and a cable link. Equally, there are 2-3 national mobile providers which cover most of the entire US.
In the suburbia this breaks, or course.
Wireless is much different, one physical piece of infrastructure covers a wide area, vs. wireline requires touching literally every location along the route. The economics are very different
It's why at one point we had 4 satellite TV options in the US at one time (C-Band, Primestar, DirecTV, and Dish Network all existed at the same time) but in 98% of the US there was only ever one cable company (some small cable companies did try to overbuild but it was and is extremely rare) and certainly only ever one landline phone company