Since it sounds like you're associated with the project, can you address some of the specific concerns mentioned, like reliability? Do you disagree that hundreds of thousands of dollars are required for five nines connectivity? Do you disagree that that level of reliability is required for your customers etc.
No you don't need hundreds of thousands. You do need tens of thousands. We've had no downtime this year at supernode1. Yes reliability is a big priority, but it is not a big priority for the big ISPs in NYC. Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) has barely two nines. In Manhattan it would go down in the East Village after every large storm. We are already providing faster more reliable connections than this.
What frequency do the point-to-point links run at? Have you considered using some sort of lower frequency packet radio for longer distance links, perhaps to other nearby nodes?
Our recurring costs are only for the lease at supernode1, which is around $1000/month. Divide that by our member node count (158) multiplied by users of each node ~4, 1000/(158*4)gives you under $2/month per user. Members usually pay for their own routers so that isn't included. To set up the supernode was about a $10K one-off charge for install fees, servers and antennas.
DE-CIX, our IXP, donated bandwidth to us, and we have transit also donated from Packet Host and WebAir. We actually pay nothing for bandwidth. Probably one day we will pay but it is not that expensive if you do this at an IXP and use peering.
We have an AirFiber pair that is 24Ghz, but all of our sectors are 5Ghz wifi.
We get a lot of support from the NYC networking community, and we have a lot of friends at the NYNOG meetups. Everyone is very helpful and they also want the big ISPs to have some competition, so we get donations from quite a few people. Some also join our network and get nodes on their own roofs and help with other installs!
DE-CIX is the biggest IXP and they measure their network in terabits/sec. It is not a big deal for them to donate us a 1 gig connection. (it's a big deal for us!) Eventually we may upgrade it to 10 gig.
Ah, so you get free bandwidth from people that want to balance their traffic for better peering contracts. That's clever. Probably not a helpful model for other areas that aren't bandwidth centers like NYC, and should probably be more out there when you're evangelizing so people understand you're getting a large portion of your operating expenses donated...
I have to assume another cost that's not noted is roof rights. That's not free - most people either have to pay or give the property management a kickback.
NYC is an interesting place for this - if you live in Manhattan, you clearly can afford the $80 for 1Gb/s FiOS or $40 for 100Mb/s FiOS or whatever Spectrum is charging. It would be way more interesting to plop this in a rust-belt city where people are on a paycheck-to-paycheck salary...
FWIW, I have many many companies as customers for whom I've offered pricing for three, four, and five nines of reliability (for mobile app backends, not residential ISP service, but lets run with it any way).
Not a single one of them has ever signed up for anything more expensive than three nines. Only a few have even discussed the differences between 3 and 4 nines solutions.
I'm reasonably sure I'd choose the same for my home internet connection - if offered representative pricing based on costs of providing 3, 4, or 5 nines, or possibly even 2 nines - I'd choose the least expensive because losing a few minutes or even occasionally 15mins a day of connectivity at home (or maybe more realistically an ~8 hour outage per month) really isn't going to bug me greatly - not if it's two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than a four of five nines connection.
I don't think this is a helpful reply.
Since it sounds like you're associated with the project, can you address some of the specific concerns mentioned, like reliability? Do you disagree that hundreds of thousands of dollars are required for five nines connectivity? Do you disagree that that level of reliability is required for your customers etc.