It's like everyone feels entitled to something they didn't know existed a few years ago.
If you are not big tech, that’s a lot of money. For the home in the middle of nowhere, $1500 could be more than you would pay in monthly rent. Plenty of rural people without access to good internet were hoping for Starlink to save them from garbage DSL connection options.
Look, friends of mine did this, they bought a country place so they can live the dream and write software in the sticks.
Next thing you know they're drilling new wells and installing a generator to support the fantasy while the bills pile up. When you bring modern conveniences to rural life it costs money.
I can't wait until our urban cable-modem and DSL providers pick up those "congestion surcharge" ideas! (FCC tariffs prevent this, right?)
I'm not really sure what people want here. Capacity is limited. They're adding more as fast as they can, to the point that they've launched more satellites than everyone else has combined in history. But it takes time. Until capacity meets demand, there are going to be limitations, one way or another. At least they are actively adding capacity, unlike some ISPs I've had with old infrastructure that couldn't handle modern demands and just left it that way.
I'm sure people would be complaining just the same if they had no surcharge but throttled everybody, or imposed strict data limits, or stopped accepting new customers entirely in congested areas.
In contrast, DSL technology was sold as "never congested, never shared": that is, your copper pairs would wire up directly to the wire center, and have a dedicated connection into the ISP's backbone (and that ISP was experienced in telecommunications, rather than the entertainment industry) and therefore, DSL was always superior due to its lack of shared mediums.
It was a weird argument, because inevitably, every provider's core network is shared to some degree, and cable modems really have not suffered congestion beyond the ordinary. Conversely, DSL also had its strategies for aggregation, overselling, and shared media. But a lot of people believed those stories about topology myths.
Personally, I switched from ADSL to cable modem over 18 years ago, and I haven't regretted it. Very stable, always available and reliable, and plenty of bandwidth to spare, for my applications.
I've lived in and had friends live in apartments with absolutely terrible noisy neighbor problems on coax networks. Too much junk plugged in making all kinds of noise on the same run making internet services close to useless. DSL infrastructure lost out to cable at the start in that area so it got practically no upgrades since it was first implemented. While far more reliable it was ancient speeds at even higher prices.
It seems like it largely took 5G home internet actually being a thing in those areas for the cable companies to start fixing those buildings and rooting out the problems.
Cable modem congestion and line quality issues definitely vary greatly on the operator and the actual location installed at. A cheap old apartment building filled with poor residents is likely to have abysmal line quality. A well-off neighborhood of single family homes probably has no problems with line quality at all.
Random example, my house has fiber and cable available. The internet plans are similar, except fiber offers 30x higher upload speeds, which is a direct consequence of better topology.
In the case of FWA they just say no.
Should a car company be allowed to charge you an extra fee every time you have a passenger?
Rural homes do have roads that can be reached on a rusty pickup.
This kind of behaviour does rather dampen the value proposition for such people.