Yes, this is called a ‘natural monopoly’. It’s the case with most infrastructure - basically there is little incentive for a private company to be more efficient than a public utility, since anybody building competing infrastructure is infeasible, but because they want to make profit there is incentive for them to charge more and to cut costs in other ways (like not investing in more than the bare minimum of maintenance). So it generally tends to work out worse for the customers.

Unfortunately some people genuinely believe the private sector will always deliver services cheaper and more efficiently than the public sector, so all around the world this mistake keeps being made. And the continual failures seem to never affect the firm belief of the adherents to that theory…

The EU forces telcoms and ISPs to allow competition on their infra. Decent prices and good service