While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of having a single last mile connection to each home, IMHO I think giving the government a role is a really bad idea. As a FTTH engineer that has deployed millions of feet of last mile optical fibers, I can tell you government is clueless as to how best do this (as I might add are the MSO's). The majority of small FTTH ISP's have received funding through the USDA RUS, which has specific engineering requirements. Those requirements are prehistoric and dramatically inflate the cost of deployment. For example, one of the better topologies is to implement fast spanning tree to each home over 2 route-diversified connections back to a municipal ring. This dramatically reduces cost vs a star topology build-out (typically endorsed by RUS), and increases fault tolerance. The RUS estimates cost per home well in excess of $1,800 while it is possible to reduce that to well under $1,000 using appropriate engineering. One of the big problems is that most larger organizations (e.g. MSO's) have separate departments for physical networking (buried/aerial cable) and for Ethernet networking (spanning tree etc). As these departments do not communicate well at the design/planning stage, they do not enjoy engineering economies. The MSO's actually believe quite sincerely that their cost of FTTH is at least an order of magnitude higher than it is - they are just plain wrong.