That has nothing to do with fiber, it’s all about politics and a regulatory environment where nobody is incented to act. Basically, the states can’t fully regulate internet and the Federal government only wants to fund buildouts on a pork barrel basis. Most recently rural.

At the local level, there is generally a cable provider with existing rights of way. To get a fiber provider, there’s 4 possible outcomes: universal service with subsidy (funded by direct subsidy), cherry-picked service (they install where convenient), universal service (capitalized by the telco) and “fuck you”, where they refuse to operate. (ie. Verizon in urban areas)

The private capitalized card was played out by cable operators in the 80s (they were innovators then, and AT&T was just broken up and in chaos). They have franchise agreements whose exclusivity was used as loan collateral.

Forget about San Diego, there are neighborhoods in Manhattan with the highest population density in the country where Verizon claims it’s unprofitable to operate.

I served on a city commission where the mayor and county were very interested in getting our city wired, especially as legacy telco services are on the way out and cable costs are escalating and will accelerate as the merger agreement that formed Spectrum expires. The idea was to capitalize last mile with public funds and create an authority that operated both the urban network and the rural broadband in the county funded by the Federal legislation. With the capital raised with grants and low cost bonding (public authority bonds are cheap and backed by revenue and other assets), it would raise a moderate amount of income in <10 years.

We had the ability to get the financing in place, but we would have needed legislation passed to get access to rights of way. Utilities have lots of ancient rights and laws that make disruption difficult. The politicians behind it turned over before that could be changed.