I don't know the history of Swedish broadband before the fiber investment. I do know that countries like Sweden and Japan that have very high fiber deployment did so through national governmental involvement: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-w....

To the extent the federal government has demonstrated an interest in broadband here in the U.S., it has mostly been on issues like the rural-urban broadband gap (i.e. the "digital divide.") Which makes total sense when you consider the demographics: in the U.S., the locus of political power is outside the cities. It's the same reason Obama gets demonized by half the country for talking about rail and public transit.

With the federal government out of the picture, it's left to the state and local governments, which: 1) don't have much money; 2) are politically dysfunctional. Imagine proposing municipal fiber in San Francisco. Comcast wouldn't have to send any lobbyists over to shoot it down. You'd have NIMBY's complaining about the digging and the size of the network cabinets, and they'd paint the whole thing as a boondoggle sop to the "techie types that are ruining the city."