I thought data caps for home internet were a thing of the past…
I’ve somewhat recently moved back to a very rural area of the Midwest. Small town. No stop lights. Biggest businesses other than the bars are Casey’s, Subway, and Dollar General.
And we have one ISP (not counting DSL) — Mediacom. When we first signed up, I had to go with the second service tier. But not because of speeds, but so I could have a reasonable 1 TB/mo data cap.
Lucky me, they increased the cap to 1.5 TB. 🙄
I hope that in my lifetime I can see ISPs regulated as a public utility.
This comes off as flippant, but it's viable at least on a small scale as a WISP. Point to point wifi has become both good and cheap, with a pair of devices from companies like tplink or ubiquiti running around $200.
You can "shoot" wifi over air for miles now with near pinpoint accuracy. If your area has a tall landmark(water tower, grain elevator, etc) or is willing to let you put up a tower, you can trench line to just that location and load it up with WAPS to shoot wifi to customers in the surrounding area. You can also often use this customers as repeaters to widen the coversge.
For a real life example, some folk living in the islands off the coast of Washington started their own from scratch.
Also theoretically you can co-pay with your neighbour. Both of you are unlikely to utilize full channel at the same time anyway.
Ideally, you would want to find 50-100 neighbors, or whatever your bandwidth/range could handle. Take a $1000 deposit or whatever seems sane to cover initial costs, giving them their first "X" months free. Maintain the system for that time period, then you are generating a profit and providing much better service.