I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it’s quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

Yeah, but you see, the electricity and telephone rollouts were done in the New Deal era or shortly thereafter. The government has been subjected to way too much regulatory capture since then to ever consider doing something that would help the public at the expense of corporate profits nowadays.