When people talk about how connectivity reaches a community, they're usually describing one of three models. Across most of the U.S., that's also the ceiling: consumers and businesses get whichever single model happens to exist in their area—not the best possible combination of systems, technologies and solutions to serve their needs. This status quo—the tyranny of Either/Either, Or—does not serve communities or individual takers of connectivity. We must move from Either/Either, Or to Yes, And.
The first model is the large, incumbent telecommunications providers. These providers, rooted in the history of the Bell System, work diligently to preserve their monopolistic model—either as legacy vertically-integrated entities or more recently in partnership with wholesale fiber builders where they are the exclusive provider for the last-mile to subscribers.
The second model is the challenger class: a handful of new mid-size fiber providers alongside a severely fragmented cohort of smaller regional and local ISPs. Structurally, these mid-size fiber challengers are generally no different from the incumbents: the company that owns the fiber is the same company selling the service, exclusively, to subscribers—mostly homes and small businesses. Nothing changes from Model One—just the size of the company doing it.
The third model calls itself Open Access—a term originally coined to describe a system that would deliver real consumer choice: multiple ISPs competing for every subscriber across one shared network. That's not what the term means anymore.
Today, "Open Access" more often describes either 1) neutral middle-mile fiber, leased to last-mile providers who build exclusive networks into the specific neighborhoods they choose to serve, or 2) wholesale fiber builders under contract to one exclusive anchor tenant for the whole market. There's no competition where it actually matters—at the edge, in front of the consumer. In practice, this version of Open Access has become a way for the large incumbents to engineer the outcome of Model One under the branding of Model Three—for the purpose of capital optimization.
In each case, enormous capital is being spent building new fiber networks designed and optimized for one thing: retail internet access focused on residential and small business service. This narrow focus ignores the fulsome needs of the community as a whole—the resident, the business, the enterprise, the school district, and the municipal utility.
The result: the vast majority of people in this country have access to either one large national or one regional ISP—delivered either through a vertically integrated network, or through a wholesale open-access network dressed up to look like progress. Recent regulatory evolutions—which seek to be “fair” to different technologies rather than focusing on optimizing outcomes for individuals and communities—only exacerbate this status quo.
Underline has built something different: a comprehensive, fully neutral fiber network—brought to life by a proprietary cloud-native network intelligence and software platform. This combination of infrastructure and technology delivers a competitive marketplace of service providers to every subscriber from day one—across a single, capital efficient, multi-purpose network. One network, built once, capable of serving every segment of a community: homes, MDUs, small businesses, complex enterprise, academic institutions, local governments, and municipal utilities.
This isn’t theoretical. Today, the Underline model serves every client segment and delivers real choice to end subscribers—with no friction to switching providers, because the infrastructure is neutral all the way from the core to the client and provisioning is fully automated, agnostic to the underlying architecture and hardware manufacturers.
For good reason, the first partners on the Underline Marketplace are popular local providers and regional pioneers of the open access model. Though it’s worth stating: Underline is not anti-incumbent—we are simply anti-monopoly.
This is where “Yes, And” comes in: a fully neutral, multi-purpose network that’s engineered to deliver more than just internet connectivity, and carries the whole range of solution providers—regional, national, incumbent—to every subscriber. This is the evolution the market needs.
A network built only to deliver "internet bundles" leaves capability and revenue on the table. Today that gap is harder to ignore than ever: AI and inference-driven services, with their stringent requirements for ultra-low latency, will depend on infrastructure that does more than move packets of data over Layer 3 to a router. A modern fiber network, brought to life by the right technology that transforms “dumb” glass, can become a whole community operating system.
Community needs aren't static or singular—they are only growing in scale and in kind. The infrastructure and providers that serve them should reflect this reality.
To get there we must start with the outcome and work backward to the right combination of solutions, instead of picking a model first and asking the community to live with its limits. Why build infrastructure to a lower standard than what's actually possible, just because that's how it's always been done?
That's the discipline behind Underline: put community needs at the center, define the outcome, rank the available solutions honestly, and keep raising the bar. Don’t settle for whatever's easiest to build, or whatever clears the minimum speed and bandwidth thresholds that current broadband policy treats as the finish line.
Either/Either, Or cannot deliver what communities need now. It's time for Yes, And.
