[pessimizer]

He's serving 600 households afaik, not offering service to 600 households. So the assumption is that there's a 0% attrition rate. Pretty safe assumption for monopolies, or for local services with half the price and 5x the bandwidth of the other choices.

[boplicity]

We're talking about the ROI on the 417 houses he's installing access for, not his total customer base. 2.6m / (417*(55+30)) = months to $2.6 million in revenue.

However, the assumption was that all 417 houses connected will become customers. That's a pretty big assumption. The actual percentage could be 50% or 90%. I don't know -- but surely the answer will have a big impact on the time it takes to reach that amount of revenue.

[the_watcher]

Going from 0 to 1 internet providers is likely to have an extremely high conversion rate assuming affordable pricing and quality. While it's anecdotal, I have personal experience with this. My family is from rural eastern WA and spends the summer in the mountains up there. Until 2020, the only internet service option was HughesNet, which was extremely expensive and very low quality, as it's a notoriously rugged region that's difficult to serve (it's still ineligible for Starlink). In 2020, a local was able to get a 5G tower installed (way cheaper and way higher quality). When I had him set us up, he told me he'd already installed it for 60% of the cabins on the chain of lakes our house is on. He expected it to be 100% by 2022.

All that said, my experience does remind me that many of the people up there turn it off for the winter, when they aren't there. My assumption is that there'd be some amount of desire to do that, which would also reduce returns.