In Stockholm the fiber operator (which is owned by the municipality but operated as a private company) built the network over more than a decade, based on demand and by using revenues to support further expansion. E.g. it primarily targeted businesses first. In New York, the city demanded Verizon wire up the whole city in just five years, and started a civil rights investigation because it’s verboten to wire up profitable areas first. Sweden’s approach to fiber in rural areas was to give rural people a tax credit worth up to $600 or so. In the US, instead of giving tax benefits for fiber, we put a special tax on telecom services (like it’s something bad like cigarettes or alcohol) and use that money to subsidize rural users at up to tens of thousands of dollars per subscriber. Our rural and inner city politics makes for some very bad policies when it comes to fiber deployment.