Hacker News Reader

The answer is No because your local friendly NIMBY will kill such a project for some asinine reason.

I tried laying fiber to an island in Canada. The locals were ecstatic about it, the telco did what they could to block it, then, when it was clear we were going to succeed they finally put in minimal broadband for the one village within the area we were going to cover killing all economies of scale that we might have found.

NIMBY had nothing to do with it.

You could’ve signed up the people in advance into a yearly contract before even starting the build (with fair clauses that they can opt out at no charge if the service turns out different than expected, etc).

It doesn't make sense for the average individual homeowner to sign something like this. It's also very difficult to do a fair clause for service quality that works at scale for a contended residential service.

Also a one-year contract still doesn't protect you from them setting predatory pricing for expiring contracts the next year. A large telco can play many games of attrition that are very hard for a small (non-VC) startup to win.