My grandmother's rural Minnesota town laid fiber as part of the process of replacing the roads in the town. This greatly reduced the installation costs since they were able to basically sneak in halfway through the road repair to install the conduits.

It seemed pretty smart and it got her some cheap high speed Internet/TV/Phone through a third party ISP. The only weirdness is that the company doesn't appear to have a website, so she can order gigabit internet but has to call them up on the phone to get it.