Yes, and various governments arrived at different solutions based on local politics and societal expectations. In Europe, for example, telephones were generally made an extension of the post office department. In parts of Canada, even retail distribution of hydroelectric power was done by the government or quasigovernmental entity that had dammed the river. A number of US cities created municipal electric utilities rather than give a franchise to a private company; Austin is the most prominent one that comes to mind today. The New Deal Era Rural Electrification Administration created coöperatives in rural areas that the private electric and telephone companies were slow to serve. The arguments over whether local transit should rely on private companies, be a regulated utility, or be a government service went on for most of the 20th century—so long that in a lot of small cities the question became moot as the transit lines simply disappeared.

Follow up question. What about gas and other fules.

In the 19th century there was debate on whether or not the telegraph should be nationalized since it was seen as too powerful of a tool to be controlled by private industry, its inventor Samuel Morse wanted to sell his patents to the federal government in the 1840s but was turned down, not wanting his invention to die he turned to the private sector. Interestingly enough, Alexander Grahm Bell's father-in-law, Gardiner Green Hubbard, a leading New England Attorney was strongly against the private telegraph industry which was controlled by the likes of the Vanderbilt's and Jay Gould in the 1870s had lobbied for its nationalization; which is why he was interested and supportive of his son-in-laws project which he saw as a alternative to the telegraph. While Bell created the telephone it was Hubbard who created the telephone industry acting as Bell's business manager, attorney and first president of Bell Telephone. Interestingly enough, Bell Telephone from the beginning aimed for monopoly, which it gained through excessive patent litigation against Elisha Gray, and Thomas Edison (who actually created a better version of the telephone than Bell). After the expiration of their patents in 1893 Bell Telephone kept its monopoly and avoided antitrust litigation both by saying competition would undermine its national telephone network which it had established on the eve of America's entry into the First World War and by pumping profits into Bell laboratories which was responsible for numerous developments in technology in physics, such as the vacuum tube and transistor. The government was reluctant to potentially harm the most innovative laboratory in the United States during the Cold War which is why it took till the 1984 for Bell to loose its monopoly. TLDR: Some people in the 19th Century wanted the Telegraph to be nationalized, including the father-in-law of Alexander Grahm Bell, who helped shape Bell telephone into a national monopoly with the backing of the US Government who feared that competing phone companies wouldn't establish a national/integrated telephone network.

Sources: Christopher Beauchamp "The Telephone Patents: Intellectual Property, Business and the Law in the United States and Britain, 1876-1900" & his new book "Invented by Law"

An Article I can't find by Sheldon Hochheiser an expert on the History of AT&T

Kenneth Silverman "Lightening Man-The Accursed Life of Samuel Morse"