Municipal ISPs and ISPs leasing municipal infrastructure dominated PCMag's speed ratings until they excluded local ISPs. Many have excellent satisfaction ratings. Large private ISPs consistently have some of the worst of any business.
Well, there's two aspects at play here.
For starters, you do need to be a certain size as an ISP to really offer cheap services. Imagine, for example, being a town of 500 with a municipal ISP. You'd end up with a lot of equipment to store and maintain and to really be effective, you'd have to employ a bunch of people that spend most of their time doing nothing. (After all, how often would the customer service rep for a small town ACTUALLY be answering any calls?).
That's why a state, county, or national? run ISP would probably make more sense, especially in more rural locations.
That being said, in the UK with BT and the line rentals I described earlier those worked unreasonably well. ISPs could complain to BT to fix problems which ultimately left the various ISPs in a region to compete on tech and price. That was a win for the customer.
There's a lot of nitty gritty policy weeds of what went wrong. But the main one was that after the public ISP incorporated in the 90s as a complimentary service to a public cable network, the state passed a legislation regulating public utility rates. Good for power/water/sewer/cable customers. But it meant that the city could not charge customers differently even with wildly different internet speeds.
Going into the 90s, as the internet aspects became more important, they couldn't keep up with upgrading the lines, especially given the costs would be born by all customers regardless of what speed they were getting.
But I think one lesson is that internet and other utilities are not quite as functionally comparable as people claim. Per capita consumption of water has not quadruped in the last 10 years, but home internet has! So the case for internet as a public utility will be stronger when the need for constantly upgrading infrastructure plateaus.
But I think that is also what holds up the adoption of public services - the difference between typical customer service in the US and say, the Post Office or DMV, turns a lot of people off from the idea of public ISPs or etc.
(Although, based on some time spent in Munich makes me think the quality/availability of broadband in Europe is also not all that).
Starlink, comcast, hughes.net and at&t customer support can take my RJ45 crimper and stick it where they don’t need network connectivity (sideways).
In many other spheres I will concur America has a better customer service culture. But I think alot comes down to taste and incentives. I am happy with not getting fussed over at a restaurant for example, and the odd frustration comes weighed against the fact I'm not really socially obligated to tip (although usually do).
The point stands though that the feedback loop between customer wants and the government is much much longer than between consumer and business.
In the US, the rails are private and the government owns the passenger service. In Europe, the government owns the rails and the passenger service is private.
People try to frame these issues as "socialist/capitalist" or some nonsense all of the time. But the reality is that neither system is more or less capitalist than the other. It's just one is better structured than the other.
However, having lived in a town in the US that has had a public ISP for decades, it was abhorrent. Municipalities only care about cost cutting - so there was no investment in wiring infrastructure or customer service. So I think there is an argument to be made that we may take for granted a bit the difference between rails/roads and fiber optics.