> My understanding is that places like ours are the best case scenario with municipal broadband: most likely to see uptake (the lifeblood of these schemes), universal adoption of broadband, enough density to make last mile delivery feasible.

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.