I will disagree about the need for a good grounding electrode. Yes lightning and surge protection requires a good ground reference that everyone uses (PoCo, Cable, Telco, Satellite).
There is also a safety issue. If you are counting on the PoCo ground for a reference in wye distribution, expect to see several volts between their neutral and the actual dirt under your house, concrete floors, water pipes etc. It was enough to wake me up when I first moved here. Everything "grounded" would give you more than a tingle if you were barefoot on the terrazzo floor. I found the ground clamp, not listed for burial, had rusted off (bolts failed). I had some bronze ones in my truck from doing raised floor bonding and a new clamp fixed the problem but it did point out the value of the ground electrode. I grew up with copper service pipe going to cast iron that went everywhere so we always had a good ground. In fact you could lift the neutral and usually nobody would ever know. You were using your neighbor's neutral.
I did a study some years ago about how much stray current there is is my single wire wye distribution here. There are a few amps on my neutral with the main breaker off, coming from the utility and the pole ground wires run from less than 1 to over 3 amps.
You can talk theory all day long but Dr Ohm always wins. The voltage drop in the utility neutral shows up as a voltage rise on your neutral and that 4 gauge wire stapled to the bottom of the pole and going up to the transformer is no match for the current imposed on it. That is their ground electrode.
