The thing is the bulk of the cost is pulling wires. Fiber optic cables have an almost unlimited theoretical bandwidth. You just need to upgrade the hardware on both sides, which is getting cheaper by the minute.
I mean, just do a traceroute and see how many hops there are before you get to a peering node. In a municipal system, that's all infrastructure that the government has to pay to upgrade.
Most carrier equipment operates below layer 3, and so is invisible to traceroute. But since you referenced it:
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 192.189.29.1 (192.189.29.1) 4.120 ms 4.267 ms 4.427 ms
2 172.17.1.85 (172.17.1.85) 4.021 ms 4.077 ms 4.100 ms
3 h252.63.131.40.static.ip.windstream.net (40.131.63.252) 10.661 ms 10.613 ms 10.600 msHalf joking: is it because the government gave Verizon billions of dollars?