The reality is that getting municipal broadband in the US is very challenging.
Even if you get the political good will early on, the fight that big players bring on is significant. One recent effort I was involved in was almost there after years of planning and having just completed a pilot build out, but got derailed by a commercial provider responding to an RFP for service by sending the municipality a non-response notice along the lines of "It's great that you're building out FTTH, but we plan on doing a full FTTH deployment of our own and it will be done within a year, just thought you'd like to know." This in itself was enough to kill any further funding, without any evidence that the company will actually follow through, because nobody has the appetite for the politics of holding the bag. They effectively got to the right people to kill the effort. Now the community is trying to see if that provider will buy a lease on what's been built so it's not a black eye in front of tax payers.
The best solution is not the one that established corporations want to see:
1. The municipality owns and deploys dark fiber using an open access FTTH model in an Active Ethernet design (e.g. every household or building has a dedicated strand, no GPON). The prevents people from being locked in to a specific speed, technology, or provider. If someone needs 100G the fiber will support it just fine.
2. The municipality maintains fiber concentration points and equipment huts or facilities for providers to co-locate equipment and service customers directly (allows choice and competition).
3. An anchor non-profit ISP (established as a 501(c)(3) and managed under a member-owned Credit Union model) is funded via a grant to provide day-1 service, but any commercial provider is free to make use of the fiber to service any location using a fair and published fiber strand fee that is presented to the customer as part of their bill (usually $10 a mo.)
4. The initial build-out is fully funded as a universal service (every property in the community, not just the high margin locations) through low-interest municipal bonds (10 year) and paid for using a modest property tax increase like any other municipal infrastructure effort. Fee collection covers ongoing maintenance and if adoption is good can cut the tax burden down by as much as half.
In other words we need to start thinking of dark fiber as a public utility the same way we think about water or electricity, but we also need to do it in a way where that utility doesn't get in the way of service delivery. The fiber is the road, and the delivery trucks that drive on it are the ISP.
Everything here is easy to do. The problem is you can almost never win the political fight to make any of it happen, at least not at the municipal level when going up against national corporations that bring in more money in one month than your annual budget.
There is no reason cost-driven for people to not have symmetrical gigabit as a baseline level of connectivity. Under the model described above, you can deliver gigabit service for about $50 a mo.