I don't think her DSL argument is coherent. The only reason DSL is available to most houses is that those wires were put in by a municipal phone company or highly regulated monopoly. Anybody who has talked to a DSL tech knows that a lot of that infrastructure is creaky, many decades old. We need to figure out what to do for the next century.
Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.
Those same DSL techs often know exactly what needs to be done to save the telecom company they work for, deploy GPON.
Verizon broke new ground and did it in the early 2000s, and its the only reason they still have as many customers as they do. The assets they sold to Frontier were partially upgraded, and have taken a beating due to Frontier's internal incompetence and poor service. Reactivating service to an existing ONT should not take more than a few minutes, yet it takes 24+hrs with Frontier.
The cable companies are willing to do what is neccesary to get customers up and running, which is how they have hollowed out the incumbent telecom's business.
Here's the sad truth: you're not going to be able to do anything for the next century. The next century will not happen in the US cities you are thinking about. They will happen in other US cities or elsewhere in the world.
Personally, I think we should at least look at the local loop as a natural monopoly. Just like the city is expected to own and maintain the road to your house, it should own and maintain the digital equivalent. From your house to the POP, it's city fiber. From the POP onward, sure, let that be run commercially, with a free minimum tier, say 5 mb/s. If you want anything more, you can contract with any ISP who has a presence in your POP. That way we get both a truly competitive marketplace and universal access.