It's infeasible when there's enough political money from the nationwide ISPs to make installing a new network prohibitively expensive.
Comcast, ATT, and Spectrum's ceiling of profit is the difference between the cost of delivering services and the potential cost of installing a competitive network.
And it's far easier to increase the latter than innovate and decrease the former.
What smaller competition will be capable of laying copper or fiber to its constituents? Even cities are, in many cases, rendered incapable of providing competition.
And, for the record, wireless is not a viable competition for copper, let alone fiber. The available bandwidth by the most cutting-edge offerings is too low and latency is too high.
the hypothetical here is that Comca$t is going to artificially throttle Netflix and give you mandatory free (paid) access to their own streaming platform.
all a WISP has to do to compete is offer more bandwidth than the throttle allows with no bandwidth shaping at a competitive price.
If all that the internet was was streaming video, sure. It's not, though.
The WISP also has to be resilient against Comcast removing the cap at a lower price (at least until the WISP folds). And against being bought out by Comcast. And against Comcast's lawyers and lobbyists (the wireless spectrum being a government controlled and finite resource).
you make it sound like competing with comcast is impossible. it might be difficult, yes, but if you have less-than-shit policies in your state/muni lots of options tend to pop up.
i live in Utah, and i have several ISP options pretty much anywhere along the Wasatch Front, including fiber and wireless. i can't speak for anywhere else, but its not like its impossible.
They could first start small – municipalities, LANs, HOA-based WANs, consolidating slowly. It's like you're saying that no ISP progress will ever be made if someone is not using existing AT&T networks.
Comcast, ATT, and Spectrum's ceiling of profit is the difference between the cost of delivering services and the potential cost of installing a competitive network.
And it's far easier to increase the latter than innovate and decrease the former.