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Ok, for some reason the link was eaten...

Attempt number 2: http://bredbandskartan.pts.se/...

(1) The open city networks in Sweden are generally expected to pay for themselves through the small fees they charge ISPs when they sell their services on them.
  Here is a report (in swedish) from The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (somewhat equivalent of FCC) on the cost/price calculations commonly done:
If I understand it correctly, they calculate a return on investment of different periods for these categories:
Canalization: 15-50 years (recommended 20-40 years*)
Fiber: 10-30 years (recommended 20-30 years*)
Active equipment: 3-10 years (recommended 3-5 years*)
Equipment at customer: 0-3 years
*recommended by the Swedish City Network Association, a non-profit organization comprising the municipalities and municipality-owned companies who have city networks.

(2) The networks are often built for a much lower cost than you might think. Since it's the municipalities and local utilities building them, they have been taking the opportunity for years whenever there is road/construction work for other purposes to just lay down empty ducts everywhere and later using Cable jetting to build the actual fiberoptic network.
I was told by the CTO of the municipality-owned utility company where I used to live that doing it that way brought down that part of the costs from ~$5M to ~$0.4M versus digging just to lay fiber.

(3) Even if the municipality has a monopoly over the city network infrastructure, there is always competition from xDSL, cable-tv and a handful of different 4G networks, all of which are also available pretty much everywhere.
I happen to live in one of the few municipalities with a privately owned city networks, but i still have a choice from more than a dozen different ISPs, two of which offer gigabit connections at just over $100/month.

(4) The customers are normally never in contact with whatever organisation is running the city network, they deal directly with the ISPs offering their services on them.

The press release (Swedish) from PTS (the regulating body referred to) makes it clear that the word is banned unless for banks or if it is otherwise clear that the name in question can not lead to misunderstandings.

A little more information than what you can get from the summary, TFA or the contentless blog rant TFA links to.

Sounds you were unlucky. The latest report from PTS (the Swedish post and telecommunications board) says that 97% of all phone connections offer *DSL.

TPTest http://sourceforge.net/projects/tptest/, an open source test suite from "Post och Telestyrelsen" http://www.pts.se/, a division of the Swedish goverment. Even a 200 MHz Pentium MMX running Linux could test a 100MBit/s fiber reliably.

www.pts.se is the Swedish institution in charge of monitoring the cookie behaviour. Click on this link (there is an English translation that you read. What's funny is that a couple of cookies get set as soon as you load the page asking whether you accept the use of cookies. I've heard of a rumour that says that someone has already informed the Swedish police that PTS is committing a crime.

Post och Telestyrelsen (the authority enforcing the law) has an english version of the "info text" needed for using cookies

No, I don't get that. Have a look at Sweden, our dear friend Bredbandsbolaget (ISP) offers consumers 10Mbit for $30 and has done so for years. It was actually cheaper a couple of years ago, only $20. I don't have that ISP, but I got an offer from mine that this fall we can get 26Mbit for $35 a month. And Sweden is not a overcrowded country. There has to be something else. Better competition? Could be. Our government agency that handles these issues has been really, really consumer-friendly (as they are supposed to be), and forced companies with monopoly to let other companies get access to their network and sometimes even just lower their prices! I love them! :)