I know in America we have the completely stupid system where electricity is at a regulated rate but privately provided by a given monopoly company at any given household.
That is actually another example of the problem. If governments didn't suck, and our collective interests were not clouded and in general ill thought, we would have fiber to the home be a national works project to help pull the country out of the recession.
It is currently so expensive to lay fiber because the demand and supply are in this convoluted state, where no one demands it due to the monopolies so no one makes it in great quantity so prices are artificially high so no one wants it.
If we had a gov't project to lay fiber, the massive demand (unless the gov't did the entire supply chain like they did with the NHS) would spur industry growth, and we could then export our huge fiber industry (which is high tech manufacturing, like carbon nanotubes would be in bulk) to everyone else and actually have industry again.
Of course, that would never happen, because governments almost never do anything right. And if they do it right, they do it insanely over budget and late. But it is nice to dream.
I think it might possibly work at the local level. It doesn't have the huge instantaneous demand boom of the material as a national project, but regions that have access to the raw components used in fiber tubing (sand is a silica right? Not pure enough I assume, we make the stuff somewhere out of silicates though) could subsidize and start the industry, and then sell the company after they spur demand by using their own fiber supply to give every home 100 gigabit internet connections.
Fast forward a decade and the initial cost investment to build the industry would be paying dividends in national productivity and the export market we would have for fiber. Rather than go from (on average) 56 kbps internet in 2000 to 300kbps in 2012, we could have a third of the population on fiber in a decade.
It really comes back to infrastructure. Nobody makes subways or national transit systems or lays railroads across the nation unless there is a huge unrealistic demand that forces businesses to act or if the collective power of representational government uses the investment potential of taxpayers to create and fund the services that make everyone's lives better but no one can justify giving on a case by case basis for a quick profit in the next quarter financial report.
Alas, pipe dreams. I wish I had sonic, I get the lovely fun of picking between the staunchly competitive only ISP in my area that provides single banded DSL at 300 kbps for $50 over the copper phone lines that have been in the ground for half a century. God bless America.