I suppose with Cox we could be talking about TV or Internet. If it’s Internet I’ve heard it called a duopoly. The cable TV company and phone company both had wires running to every house when the internet showed up on the scene. Typically these are the only two options available in an area, and when you zoom in further usually one of them has given up on a particular street or neighborhood, and you better just go with the one that has decent wires.

We sort of had protections in place at the phone company level for a while to stop this. ILEC and CLEC laws forced Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (the big phone co in the area, owns the lines on the poles) to share their last mile phone lines with a Competitive LEC, granted the CLEC shells up for their own equipment and puts it in a special section of the ILECs central offices. Bam, competition.

The problem is that the laws only specified copper, so when fiber rolled around, ILECs specifically targeted their upgrades to cripple the competition. The houses still would do DSL on copper, but the backhaul for the CO would get upgraded to fiber and the competition would have to also upgrade their handoff on their equipment to be fiber or just lose all their customers in the area. They would also set up fiber fed cabinets halfway closer to your house and offer VDSL. CLECs weren’t allowed in those cabinets and could only offer 1/5th the speed on regular old ADSL due to distance. There were a lot of dirty tricks…the laws that were supposed to help just let the big company absolutely batter the smaller ones once they started their fiber upgrades.