Seems like a waste of money? I'm on the commission in my wealthy, dense urban area that oversees questions like "should we municipal broadband" and it is really difficult to make the economics of doing that make sense.
But without significant scale and guaranteed uptake --- hard when you're competing with two household name ISPs --- the fixed costs of just running an ISP (or the backend infrastructure for a white-label ISP to build on top of) are prohibitive.
The best case scenario requires that the municipality is also underserved.
> But without significant scale and guaranteed uptake --- hard when you're competing with two household name ISPs --- the fixed costs of just running an ISP (or the backend infrastructure for a white-label ISP to build on top of) are prohibitive.
This is incorrect. Running an ISP is very cheap and the fixed costs are minor. It’s the building of a network that is expensive.
Source: I personally run an ISP and have built multiple networks.
Note that the economics here don't appear to work even given that we already have a municipal fiber network covering the whole municipality.
I’d be making mad cash if I had a municipalwide fiber network at my disposal.
If there is no muni network to be, I hope you are at least leasing dark fiber and other assets to ISPs.