Where I live we have it much like you describe it. I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I paid for the connection to the house from the street (US$2k). The

Where I live we have it much like you describe it. I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. I paid for the connection to the house from the street (US$2k). The fibre in the street is owned and operated by the municipality/local government. They also own the local multi-gigabit ring and provide redundant connections to the rest of the net. Then we have four different ISPs offering IP on this fibre at reasonable prices for "home use": 0.5 mbps @ $10/month, 10 mbps @ $23-28/month, 100 mbps @ $33-36/month. Un-metered. They also offer commercial contracts. I am paying under $100/month for 10 mbps. You can also get VOIP from the same operators and cable TV over the fibre from four different operators. I currently have 1x 10 mbps for the company, 1x 100 mpbs for everything else + TV and VOIP. A bunch of fixed IP addresses and capacity to add several more connections in the fibre modem. I know this is not exactly a rural town, but having the local municipality build the IP infrastructure and let companies sell their services on it has been a great success. The local municipality also owns and operates the local roads, water and sewage system, district heating, waste, as well as the local electricity grid. I can choose who to buy IP and electricity from, but water, district heating and sewage has only one supplier. Works well for us.