I brought up the 5G as an example of something that could change in the future. The problem is no one knows what is going to happen in 10-20 years. Its easy to spend public resources and have a great cheap service, maintaining this for decades is a different problem and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
The expensive part of fiber to the home is laying the fiber. It's extremely unlikely that we are going to discover a transport medium better than light pulses over fiber anytime soon.
What about wireless? Well any wireless technology you can imagine needs wireline backhaul at some point. So the bigger your fiber network, the better your wireless technology will work!
Someone has to pay to clean up the unused or derelict infrastructure in either scenario. The private company can declare bankruptcy and skip town much easier than the town government can. A town can also choose to ignore infrastructure maintenance the same way that private entities do. They can also choose to change the funding or price model or level of service, same as the private entity.
