Competition cannot occur without low (or ideally 0) entrance costs. The investment required to lay cable, let along bother to run your ISP, is such that there will never an open market.
That is (oversimplified, but not wholly inaccurate, I think) how they do it in South Korea, where the average home has only one physical data line but a choice of three big ISPs to service it. By some sort of wacky cooincidence, South Korea also has the best broadband access in the world.
(How good? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea a typicaly 1000Mb/s line is $20/mo. I have one choice, Comcast, and I pay 4x that much for 1/100th of that speed.)
But competition is possible. I have a choice of many broadband options. It used to be (20 years ago) that cable and phone where the only options to get internet, but now both the phone company and the cable company have fiber networks, and there's a community fiber network that's accessible to many ISPs. Companies that own their own last mile may be required (or are incentivised) to allow other providers to use it.
Of course if only one company owns the last mile, then that company needs to be tightly regulated, government controlled, or required to share. But with the switch from phone or cable to fiber, everybody needs new infrastructure, and everybody needs to lay new cable. That also evens the playing field a bit.
It's bizarre to see the free market fail so hard in a supposedly strongly pro-free market country like the US.
Wireless ISPs would immediately collapse if they had to serve the amount of Netflix traffic wired internet connections use in an evening. They simply aren't a viable alternative for the population at large.
The solution nobody needs, effectively. It's already economically sound to run cable/fiber in dense population centers, because the number of customers you reach with every mile of new cabling is huge.
Don't get me wrong, Webpass is very cool. But it's point-to-point and requires you to build a lot of infrastructure on the top of buildings, which requires a lot of permissions, which isn't always easy to get. The wireless ISPs that do exist outside of urban areas have to use cellphone networks, and they are not ready for the amount of data transfer required. Yet.
The existence of wireless connections does not change the fact that broadband last-mile service is a natural monopoly.
Not OP, but I recently lived in a rural area and had 3 options for Internet:
* Mediacom cable with permanent 20-50% (or more) packet loss
* CenturyLink DSL at 1mbps (not a typo)
* Local wireless company, 7mbps, no packet loss
My position is that municipal fiber is the way to go, but give wireless ISPs credit because they're helping a lot of people get on the Internet who would barely have connectivity otherwise.