however , the ISP market is a market hated by its cutomer base for decades. So you got to ask why hasnt this been done before at a reasonable scale or more often?
Didnt even google fiber run into epic hurdles due to monopolistic regulations setup by the telcom oligarch?
if Google fiber struggled how is a small startup going to be able to play?
I'm skeptical in the success of this , but i will be folowing and possibly get involved and hope they succeed.
If we really want a market-based approach we need infrastructure sharing rules. Prior to 2003 we had lots of competition in the DSL market; after the sharing rules were eliminated competition vanished almost overnight and we wound up with the monopoly situation we face today. Infrastructure sharing requirements have worked very well in France, where fiber optic service is more widely available and costs consumers less.
If there are no regulations here's how it goes: first ISPs compete in urban areas, this is very profitable with traditional active fiber to the building and ethernet to each apartment. It takes like $50 CAPEX per customer. But at some point as competition increases margins get lower and certain ISPs start looking into rural areas where they can have no real competition, i.e. DSL or radio is not a competition to fiber. New ISPs emerge too as people see an opportunity to profit from temporary geographical monopoly. So they start building in rural areas, enjoying huge margins. Today they'd use something like GPON, which is very cheap compared to the old days. It goes on until at some point the hard part becomes finding areas from where they can profit the most and where there is no real competition. This is when some start competing with other ISPs in rural areas. But as margins start to shrink in some areas due to competition they prioritize investment into areas competition unlikely to reach. There will be far away neglected areas still, but here's a twist, since there is a lot of competition people who are willing to pay will be able to find a whole bunch of ISPs willing to build fiber or at least radio links with them. In other words - it's always profitable, regulations really is the only problem.
Forcing to share infrastructure is also not necessary. It helps only if monopolies share it with everyone, not small players. With no regulations market solves this pretty well.
I landed on this house: <deleted out of respect for the owner>.
This looks pretty rural to me.
Then I went to their telco and the first thing on the homepage was a link to check for fiber availability.
Fiber is available for this home.
You might have to rethink your plan for competition. I'm guessing the result won't be too different for Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, etc.
EDIT: I tried again and landed in Batesville, AR. It seems there are three Fiber ISPs here.
Edited for courtesy to individual property owners.
According to OECD, fiber penetration is 7.9% in France versus 11.2% in the US: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroadb....
Average broadband speeds in the US are also almost twice as fast as in France: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t....