For contrast: My rural hometown of around 15,000 (not tiny but still 10 times smaller than Ft. Collins) built its own fiber network in the mid-90s. It still run

For contrast: My rural hometown of around 15,000 (not tiny but still 10 times smaller than Ft. Collins) built its own fiber network in the mid-90s. It still runs today and has expanded to include many of our smaller neighboring communities of 400-10k people. Now that the city has grown to about 20k we have larger ISPs moving in. They lease the city's infrastructure so we have a municipal fiber network with multiple competing private options. You get fancier hardware and more channels with the private companies but I find the local ISP more reliable and I have one bill for internet, power, gas, water, and waste. Way better setup than when I was in I was in ATL and forced to use Comcast. Plus there aren't any data caps.