I live in an area with great fiber internet service (gigabit synchronous unmetered) thanks to a rural electric co-op. It worked here because co-ops still have a fair bit of political power (in my state anyway).
If you have the aerial ROW fully under your own ownership and control the $/km to do rural FTTH is vastly reduced.
There are a lot of efficiencies if this is done as a nonprofit at a municipal/county level entity, one random example, county run fiber PUD calls up the same-county sheriff's department and is like "oh yeah we're gonna need to block a lane and have some traffic flaggers at place X and Y and Z, and we need to shut down avenue C for a while", and everything goes very smoothly.