Routers are pretty cheap, and nice routers can cover half of a city block. What if you had an ISP that created a mesh among its local users. You'd need to capture large fractions of a neighborhood at once, but it would potentially save you a lot of the expense associated with wiring a neighborhood.
If you can get a large enough local membership, you could have a mesh that spans multiple backbones. Your costs are then limited to getting enough people to join the network to actually form a mesh (and getting them all online at the same time), and then paying the backbones directly for the traffic you send them.
If you can get a large enough local membership, you could have a mesh that spans multiple backbones. Your costs are then limited to getting enough people to join the network to actually form a mesh (and getting them all online at the same time), and then paying the backbones directly for the traffic you send them.
Might this be a viable business strategy?