The main need for community fiber is because we've proven that private companies cannot be trusted with a broadband monopoly/duopoly and yet to allow more companies to run lines would create chaos. For that reason, the community needs to control the last mile. But the community doesn't need to be the ISP. Without the barrier to entry that is running lines to residential customers, many smaller ISPs will be able to compete with each other and you'll see the market actually work the way that it's supposed to.

So run the fiber to people's houses and charge ISPs a fixed fee per customer that covers the cost to maintain the network and, potentially, recovers a bit of the initial expense of the network. But then let customers choose their ISP based on speed and features. The worst thing you can do is replace the crap fully-private system we have now with a slightly-less crappy government monopoly.

I tend to like the open access model you are proposing. I am very inclined to operate the network on an open access model. However, depending on our funding sources, we may be forced to be an ISP and phone company to get the funding. Right now we are exploring the FCC's Rural Broadband Experiments. In theory, we could have a partner service provider handle the phone service requirement, but it may not be as easy to do in practice. Thanks for commenting. Even if we do operate our own ISP/Phone Company, it is strongly likely the network will be open access.