Should internet infrastructure (e.g. fiber) be a public utility?

I have been all over the country during this past year. Starting in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh (AP), I spent a few months in Anantapur, AP. Then I spent a month in Solan, Himachal Pradesh (HP), a month in Chandigarh, India and a couple of weeks in Ralli, Kinnaur District, HP, These places can roughly be categorized as -

• Places where I had great internet access at home e.g. via fiber. Both in Ongole, AP and Anantapur, AP, I had fiber at home and these are probably Tier-III or Tier-IV towns in India. For context, they are both district headquarters (and if you don't know many Districts make up a State). This meant 50-100 Mbps speeds which cost ~1000 Rupees per month (~10-15 Dollars). These speeds mean me, my wife, my brother and my mother can all use one or more devices at the same time and no one has to deal with slow internet or buffered video playback. All of my work calls were crystal clear and I never had to worry about downgrading the video quality on my video calls to 360p from the default 720p.
  
  
• Places where I had good internet access at home e.g. via a strong 4G cellphone hotspot. The place I stayed at in Chandigarh, India was outside the city limits and fiber wasn't available. The same was also true for the place we stayed in Solan, HP. Thankfully, I always had 4 out of 4 bars of cell phone signal in Chandigarh. In practice, this meant I could use the hotspot on my wifes phone and she could continue using the phone herself, and neither of us saw a meaningful slowdown of internet services. Adding one or more additional devices to the same hotspot e.g. a tablet would start having an impact though. Because I was relying on the 4G hotspot, from time to time, I needed to downgrade the video quality on my work calls from 720p to 360p and once in a new moon, switch off my video entirely because of the slow connectivity.
  
  
• Places where I had okay-ish to bad internet access at home e.g. via a weak 4G cellphone hotspot. The place I stayed in Kinnaur District, HP was a village in hilly terrain. For context, the village is in the Himalayan mountain range, at an altitude of ~2200 meters and has ~100 households. There were a few (or maybe just 1) cellphone tower in the village. Reliance Jio was the nearest tower which usually meant around 3 out of 4 bars of cellphone signal consistently. Airtel was available but weak and couldn't be relied upon. As far as I know, this was because the Airtel tower sat in a nearby village and the terrain meant no direct line-of-sight from where we were staying. I'm not going to talk about BSNL. All of this meant we couldn't share hotspots anymore, I worked using a 4G hotspot on my cellphone and my work laptop was the only device connected to the hotspot. More significantly, the weak 4G hotspot meant my work calls always had to happen at 360p. Every time I had a call, I had to manually change the video from 720p to 360p before joining the call. Around half the time, even that wasn't enough, and I had to disable my video entirely and instruct the meeting software not to show me the video from my work colleagues. In my personal opinion, staring at a black rectangle with voices coming out of it gets really demotivating after a week.

Now that I've told you how these places differ, i'll tell you what they have in common. They all have roads.

We lived on a small street in Ongole, AP and there's no construction and thankfully no potholes at the moment. We live next to a state highway in Anantapur, AP and when we moved here, it was being relaid. Thankfully, the potholes are covered up now. In Chandigarh and Solan, HP, roads exist but there are pot holes. Thankfully, they are nothing major and not big enough to swallow an entire car for example. The road to Kinnaur District, HP definitely has potholes, mainly because it's a hilly terrain and landslides are a common issue, especially because of the many hydroelectric plants on the way and the detonations that have taken place over the past two decades to build them. But, interestingly, because this region is strategically important for national security (the Indo-Tibetan border is not far), the roads are well maintained and major structural damages are fixed in a timely manner. Also, the hydroelectric projects are apparently contractually obligated to maintain the roads.

So, now I ask, when roads exist to all of these places, why doesn't fiber internet? The roads are a public utility so why isn't fiber a public utility? I'm not advocating for the government to provide internet services directly to consumers. I'm just asking why isn't the government providing fiber as a public utility to or close to the end consumer, at which point a private company can step in to provide the actual internet service?

Keep in mind that going from okay-ish/bad internet access to good internet access isn't incremental. It's an order of magnitude change. And going from good internet access to great internet access is another order of magnitude change. It's not just going from 1 to 2 to 3. It's going from 1 to 10 to 100.