Affordable broadband Internet?

This is an article from techdirt, an online technology magazine. The article is from their if-you-build-it-they-will-come department:

After A Decade Of Waiting For Verizon, Town Builds Itself Gigabit Fiber For $75 Per Month

I'm interested - Gigabit fiber for $75 per month? But how did they do it? The municipalities that were being ignored by the big Internet service providers got together and built it themselves.

After the $50 per month charge to offset the building cost, the actual subscription costs $25 per month...for Gigabit bandwidth. That's TEN times faster than the "up to" speed advertised by my local cable provider and their price (with TV of course) is $120 per month.

Reliable, inexpensive REAL broadband is a selling point for communities in today's growing work-from-anywhere job pool. I cannot understand why more small municipalities who want to attract people wouldn't want to consider this sort of public utility approach to Internet service. After all, it is just another connection like water and sewer.

I have nothing against commercial Internet, telephone, and TV providers. I just think there should be healthy competition, you know, like we talk about all the time. Competition is supposed to be the name of the capitalist game, right? That competition isn't going to happen when there are maybe two, or only one, or even zero viable providers in your area. There is no incentive to expand, no incentive to increase speed and capacity, and no innovation.