I feel that having fiber in big cities is a given nowadays. I don't think telcos have any plan on supporting those smaller remote towns with fiber. Maybe investment does not pay off in a reasonable amount of time.
Fiber may not be the only option though. Starlink should be becoming available soon in North America. Only time will tell if that will work out though. WiMax, for example, was a failed hard.
I'm was born in small-town in Russia with 5k people. There was an area with private houses and 2-3 floors houses with 18-24 apartments. We have linked attics of buildings with apartments with cat 6e cables and cheap D-Link switches. In 2002 our telephone hub was replaced by a digital telephone switch station where we were renting five 2 Mbits ADSL channels. So users were connected to switches in attics for a small price and anyone who wants access to the internet could configure VPN to our FreeBSD "router". I don't remember the speed limitations, but the cost of 1 Mb was about $0.04(2 Russian rubles). In 2004 ADSL was upgraded to ADSL2+ with 20 Mbits per port. In 2006 all copper equipment was replaced by fibre channel cables/routers. And some people from private houses connected to our network(they were using dial-up). In 2010 huge Russian ISP Rostelecom bought our small network. At the end of 2006, I moved to Moscow because I went to college. And of course, me and 3 of my new college friends has built local ISP in university's dormitory :) The new dormitory was opened after two months after the start of the school year, so there was no any network. Officially it was not possible to connect this building to the internet. We rented a Wi-Fi router in someone's apartment in the building next after our dormitory. I don't know what happened with network because I was expelled from university :)
It's definitely not a given even in big cities. In San Francisco the only places I've seen it offered are big apartment buildings with 50+ units. At least from what I've seen, even in pretty dense parts of the cities if you're in a small apartment building with like 10 units or you're in a duplex or attached SFH you can't get fiber service.
The upside is we can still get gigabit service over cable lines through comcast for a fairly reasonable price (although with terrible upload speeds, data caps on the plan, and the need to fight with support every year to prevent your price from going up, as with all comcast plans).
Way way off. North America is way behind in terms of residential internet speeds even in the most dense areas like NYC and San Francisco etc. Sonic just recently started ramping up around the Bay and if you're lucky enough to have service its great. Still, probably 90% of people in the Bay and 75% of the city are stuck with 30 Mb/s up max from Comcast.
Starlink won't be high a replacement for fiber for a decade if we're being optimistic. These projects have huge ramp ups, tons of expensive launches, especially if they're successful, tons of users means slower speeds for everyone. And that all assumes success.
It's actually cheaper to install fiber than POTS or Coax. Little remote mountain towns with < 100 homes have fiber when they barely had POTS (and no way was it going to support ADSL). These guys went from 28.8kbps to Gigabit in one jump. It just took a few decades longer at dial-up than the rest of the country
I feel that having fiber in big cities is a given nowadays. I don't think telcos have any plan on supporting those smaller remote towns with fiber. Maybe investment does not pay off in a reasonable amount of time.
Fiber may not be the only option though. Starlink should be becoming available soon in North America. Only time will tell if that will work out though. WiMax, for example, was a failed hard.