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(author here) I personally know probably a dozen or so people who have built a network like this, got enough customers to live comfortably for a while, and are either still doing that or eventually sold to a larger company and moved on to other things. So yes it can be profitable on a small scale.

Thanks for putting this together and sharing it. Really interesting read.

I know it's a bit personal, but would you mind attaching numbers to the notion of small scale profitability?

It varies pretty dramatically depending on how much you have to pay for fiber, how many customers you're able to get per tower, what you're able to charge (competition) and what type of customers you get (business / residential / mdu).

My back of the napkin calculations usually show that to give one person a health salary ($80-120k) and pay a few contractors or lower wage workers to do some of the grunt work you would need 300-500 residential customers.

And how long should you expect it to take to reach 300-500 customers with average effort? The operation wouldn’t be profitable from day one so you’d need to have some runway.

It can be. Often just barely so, especially if you are able to a bunch of the work on your own.

Not with net neutrality :)