I can't speak much to European history, but near-universal electrical and telephone service in the United States is the result of a very substantial regulatory

I can't speak much to European history, but near-universal electrical and telephone service in the United States is the result of a very substantial regulatory and subsidy effort from the 1920s-1970s. Some of this was achieved through regulation (e.g. AT&T's requirement to provide telephone service in all markets that met certain triggers regardless of profitability, which resulted in AT&T charging higher prices elsewhere as a form of subsidy) and through direct legislative facilitation and subsidies (e.g. the Rural Electrification Act and resulting Administration, which offered extremely advantageous loans to rural electric and telephone co-ops). These programs still exist to some degree in the form of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and Universal Service Fund Administrator Co (USAC), and the chunk of money here (called RDOF) is actually a specially earmarked portion of the USF. That said, USF's impact on improving broadband across the country has been somewhat limited because USF's focus tends to be on areas and individuals with no service (e.g. due to rural locations or poverty), rather than improving competitiveness of service in markets that have it. For example, the "Free Cellphone" popup booths you see in poorer areas of the US are an implementation of USF programs to provide subsidized connectivity to low-income individuals, as are the $10/mo ISP plans available to low-income households. This set of priorities is in no small part because, as you can imagine, the incumbent ISPs lobby against USAC actions that would subject them to more competition. But it also comes out of the history of the concept of "Universal Service" which was born in an era when regulated monopolies were the norm for public utilities, and so inter-provider competition was simply not something being discussed. At that point in history, areas with inter-provider competition were generally viewed as bad for the consumer because in areas with competing telcos (for example Los Angeles in the 1910s with LA Telephone and LA Home Telephone) you could only call people that used the same telephone company as you... requiring businesses to have two phones and list two phone numbers. The present world of multiple competing but interconnected providers wasn't really something that was contemplated when most of the regulatory system was built, and post-1982 (AT&T divestiture) the regulatory system has never really caught up... which we can fairly confidently blame heavily on extensive lobbying by both divested AT&T companies (USWest, AT&T, etc) and their competitors that forced the '82 monopoly busting (Sprint/MCI, GTE/Verizon, etc).