I think you will be surprised to find out how little "a lot" is in
My, how soon we forget. The Bell breakup was about long distance competition, and LD has indeed been quite competitive, at least until all of the LD carriers merge into one in a couple of years. But the breakup made no difference at all to local competition. Your local Bell company was and is just as much of a monopoly after the breakup as before.
Because the telecom provider is a monopoly, or now maybe a duopoly. The only companies with wires into everyone's house are the phone company and the cable company, and that is as true now as it was 20 years ago. The first mover advantage is insurmountable, and although it would be legal for someone to raise $100 billion and overbuild a new phone infrastructure alongside the one we have, it'll never happen. (If it were at all possible, it would have happened during the dot.com bubble when capital was free.) Verizon bundling DSL service is like your state telling you that you can only drive cars they sell you on their roads, and you are free to buy any other car you want if you build the roads to drive it on.
The point of splitting the telco into switchco and loopco is that the loop part is a natural monopoly and the switchco isn't. So split them up, require the loopco to provide service to everyone on an equal basis, and then completely deregulate the switchco. That would work, and we'd end up with a much more vibrant market.
Uh, no. Please, put down the kool-aid and think about what's really going on.
R's,
John
PS:
Considering all the new radio spectrum they wanted, a year was pretty quick.