No, they're not.
Sure, if you live somewhere where you can get 1 gigabit fiber, maybe. But I know Comcast/Xfinity throttles the crap out of your upload. Even if you get their 1 gigabit plan, your upload is limited to 35 mbps [0].
To put that into perspective, if you have a 1 megabyte image that ends up getting linked on reddit and 100,000 people try to download it in an hour, then you'd need over 200 Mbps upload. Very very few home users have that kind of connection.
It sounds similar to Freenet then, with perhaps less of a stress on anonymity.
Odd that you choose their second highest tier to fit your narrative instead of just jumping to their highest tier with is actually symmetrical 2Gbps up and down fiber.
Also, that $300/month is the introductory price. Lord knows what the actual price is once the initial 2 year period is over.
That's exactly what it's marketed as. There are also plenty of symmetrical fiber services with hundreds of Mbps of upload from Frontier, Verizon, AT&T, and others.
> There are also plenty of symmetrical fiber services with hundreds of Mbps of upload from Frontier, Verizon, AT&T, and others.
Most people don't have a lot of options.
The options in my neighborhood are either 150 mbps down/5 mbps up with Comcast, or 35 mbps symmetrical with Frontier.
If you have more than two options, and one of them is gigabit, you're extremely lucky. A considerable chunk of America only has 1 option, and the extreme majority doesn't have gigabit down, let alone gigabit up.
Just because something is expensive and therefore unpopular to your average consumer does not mean the product itself does not exist. If we're talking about residential ISP speed, then all residential ISPs and their respective tiers should be included.
Otherwise you're just picking and choosing data points to fit a narrative which is deceiving.
Are you slipping back out of context to talk about business again?
Mesh networks only work if you pay the big money for rental on building roofs and existing towers. This money, and so height, and so line of sight, is why cell networks work. You might get some non-profit going in areas especially conducive to it (ie, high population density cities where residents have access to their roofs, or coastal areas with large mountains).
That means "self-hosted". Distributed hosting means you can't host it in one place. I agree though, that one might consider it as a form of decentralized hosting if everybody hosts their own stuff, which you also totally can now that we have cheap computing power like raspis.
And, unfortunately, some of us don't have a choice of ISP at home.
And on a more serious note: Even in your situation a self-hosted solution might be more free. Then don't host it at home, but discuss with universities, hacker/maker clubs and companies in your surroundings and host it behind their internet connection. Usually you need one member of such an organisation to support you and then you can simply do it.
A truly distributed means of hosting is everyone hosting their own websites from their home connections. It's simpler and no central authorities are needed. Home connections are plenty fast these days. And the best part is that you get tons of storage space and you don't have to 'upload' anywhere.
You can also make real websites instead of 'single page application' javascript monsters.