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Something I've always wondered: Isn't municipal broadband mostly the last mile? It's the extremely capital intensive work of going from houses to houses rolling out fiber, maintaining a few local relays with equipment and fielding tech support requests.

Wouldn't ISPs be happier just installing their hardware somewhere and reselling their capacity wholesale and outsourcing all that last mile work to the local towns?

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Not from the perspective of an ISP. Doing this would transform broadband from a value added service to a commodity. In a commodity market, competition is stiff and this often drives profits down to an absolute minimum. The cushy profits they are currently enjoying would evaporate in short order as soon as anyone sensed that there was money to be made by drilling fiber and racking a switch in that colo.

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