Internet companies are a good example of how difficult it is to bring a utility to a giant metro area. I'm not sure if that's because of government barriers or because of actual physical logistics.
Even Google Fiber seems to have given up.
But then you look at places where internet is managed by the government like Fort Collins and you have extremely fast, extremely cheap community internet. But then again, that's a pretty small homogenous rural community.
I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of utility distribution just sporadic data points so I can't hope to get close to the truth about this.
It does seem like if you have the government and industry working together on something, it's the worst of all worlds rather than just one or the other.
If the municipality provides the fibre to each house to a local data centre, then private companies can rent space in the data centre to provide services. You still get a choice between ISPs (some may want a proper internet provision, perhaps with BGP handling and no contention on the uplink, others may be happy with a company that provides a wifi access point that also irradiates a public SSID. Presumably the former will cost more, but that's fine)
Basically the local road (the fibre) is paid for by the local city and run on behalf of the residents, the local road transports people (packets) to the airport (municipal data centre), where the ISPs pay landing fees to take people where they need to go at different rates for different services, with competition between ISPs, and pretty easy entry costs, ensuring high standards, low prices, and plenty of choice.
It does seem like if you have the government and industry working together on something, it's the worst of all worlds rather than just one or the other.