Telecommunications are rolled out either on poles or underground, which incidentally is exactly where our other utilities like electricity, phone, and water/sewage are laid out. We used to have hundreds of wires overhead everywhere and roads being dug up all the time to add new pipes. Our society has decided that the benefits of competition are outweighed by all of destruction and blockage done to the limited space of our roads. Additionally we have decided that those industries are too important to deal with outages that would come from competition and having companies go out of business. Telecommunications have reached that stage in the US at least, and given this space constraint and need to keep the service running 24/7 they should be regulated as utilities. If we split the actual ownership of the wires off into a separate utility and had different companies selling the bandwidth and services like the UKs setup, then leaving the service up to normal regulations would be fine.

As long as they own the physical network they should be a utility