It's slowly coming. I've enjoyed Sonic fiber in the residential Richmond District for 3 or so years already. Sonic is still building out fiber in other neighborhoods (e.g. Marina and Cow Hollow are now coming online, I think), as is AT&T, but there are still considerable gaps where utility poles are oversubscribed. A single unusable pole can prevent reaching several city blocks simply because the replacement cost is so high it makes those remaining blocks unviable economically. In other neighborhoods with buried utilities, the city refuses to provide any assistance: no micro-trenching permitted, and no leaning on existing license holders to lease any pre-existing underground infrastructure.
Even the least dense areas of San Francisco are more dense than elsewhere in the Bay Area. Sonic provides residential fiber in many Bay Area cities, but rollouts are far slower. Regulatory costs (including review time) and less favorable RoI (less density) means it's taking much longer to build, even when theoretically profitable. Sonic doesn't have as much capital, and those with capital (e.g. AT&T) aren't very motivated to build new infrastructure, especially when they're already the incumbent. About two years ago I chatted with an AT&T linesman putting up fiber on the utility poles outside my house and he flat-out said he wouldn't be there if Sonic hadn't forced AT&T's hand.
EDIT: Sonic is further along than I thought: "Santa Rosa-based provider Sonic has deployed fiber to more than one-third of homes in San Francisco over the past five years, Sonic CEO and co-founder Dane Jasper tells SF Weekly." https://www.sfweekly.com/news/can-san-francisco-finally-clos...
I have a friend in SF who has been given the runaround by Sonic. He believes that Sonic's ticketing system is somehow integrated with AT&T and that AT&T is closing his install ticket after they finish an install at a different residence.
The City of SF bid on the utility infrastructure in the city that was formerly owned by PG&E. Hopefully this will allow the city to streamline installation of pole-based fiber installs, but I'm not sure how much PG&E ownership was causing problems before the auction.
If that 1/3 figure includes resold AT&T service, that would definitely be less impressive.
I'm not too optimistic about any city-planned communications infrastructure. The "progressives" hold onto a pipe dream of a free, city-wide public network[1], and they seem to balk at partnering with private companies for this purpose. Fortunately the "progressives" usually fall [just] short of majority control of the city council, and haven't won the mayorship in over 20 years, but they still manage to throw monkey wrenches into sensible plans.
[1] There was (still is?) a master plan to bury fiber with the city's water & sewer network, but I think the city is half done with a city-wide, multi-billion dollar water & sewer refurbishment and replacement project without having buried any fiber at all. I'm sure most people in the city, including myself, would love to see a public fiber built-out, but it's just not financially viable. The city has too much on its plate, and the situation won't ever change. The self-styled "progressive" faction is all talk, and stonewall everything else with feigned outrage, much like national Republicans.
This way there is a huge incentive for startups as the incumbent cant just follow them and do them out of business while ignoring other areas. At the same time it puts pressure on the imcumbant to roll out FTTP to reduce startups doing roll-out.
Probably also consider something similar with pricing.
Unfortunately, I believe this install was one of the last under the DIRECTV merger deal which required AT&T to deploy residential fiber.
The spools and amount of manual work to install the fiber lines was really something to see over the course of 3 months and I can really see the value of an automated robotic fiber deployment. The legacy cables are really huge.
The bay area needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but the NIMBYs won't even let adequate housing be built so the chances of that happening are about zero.
Whatever the big picture national issues are, there is no reason the Bay Area should be lagging even compared to the rest of the US. Rich suburbs of tightly packed single family homes are prime fiber territory. Those are the very first places Verizon wired up with FiOS 15 years ago.
I live in NY, and each town or city gets to negotiate franchise agreements that always favor the telcos. You have to wield a big stick with these companies, who divide and conquer.
In my cities case, in exchange for some bullshit (public access tv and filming equipment for the high school) gave Spectrum an exclusive contract for TV.
So Verizon brought FIOS to every town around us, and we’re stuck in the internet ghetto.
If cable internet was still stuck at 25 Mbps or similar, the pressure for fiber internet would be a lot stronger.
But cable internet got good.
The backwards and scandalous aspect of modern American internet is that the ISPs managed to roll out 1 TB data caps without being blocked by lawmakers.
Most consumers aren't willing to pay the monthly cost that ISPs would be need to charge to make overbuilding fiber economically feasible. DSL providers overbuild with fiber because they can't compete with cable and the rising cost of maintenance of a copper plant. Some cable providers will do new builds with FTTH or overbuild when upgrading the existing plant is cost prohibitive. But overbuilding a working coax plant almost never makes since. Spending millions of dollars to offer higher speeds at the same price just doesn't make business sense.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-r...
Sad to say but that's probably what communities in the US will have to do as well.
Certainly I know of at least one other guy with it myself and I cannot fathom that we're a third of all the guys with fibre in the Bay.
There are plenty of areas where cable meets or exceeds the fiber bandwidth that can be sold to the home.
Anecdata, Consolidated Communications will happily sell you fiber into your business - including an MRV to convert the fiber into copper inside your property. But... the bandwidth options start out with a 10/5 Mbps line.