A real upgrade for me would involve running a cable through a beaver meadow. There is an electric line and crews do go in there to limb up trees and they are planning to replace a pole, if there was some rational coordination of services and a commitment to universal service they’d get the fiber in when they do a maintenance cycle on the power line.
We used to go out every day to take apart unwanted dams near our driveway. If you go at it in a disciplined way, taking out the sticks from downstream, then digging out the mud, and never letting the water level to get high enough that they can easily float materials to the dam site, it's not that hard. It was awful, however, if they dammed 3/4 of the culvert pipe in which case you had to work inside the pipe with low clearance and (I think) high CO2 levels and no really good place to put the debris. At least they would never reuse materials that they used once.
I don't think anyone has done that in the last year, I certainly haven't.
Where I live roads are private (part of the lot) with reciprocal easement to all other lot owners to travel on the easement. It's not a toll and it's not 'public' or 'government'. No worries about government making crazy rules on their roads, when we own it.
Closer to topic, I want to get neighbors and everyone onboard with installing fiber in road and leasing to ISPs. Way too many hassles, so we remain dependent on Comcast.
I hope this leads to wired ISP price reductions, or at least slower price growth. I happen to live in a VZW dead zone, so unfortunately it won't work for me...
Not sure if this is completely the case when it comes to older networks that might need upgrades because lots of folk are sharing the same coax line. In an HFC[1] network, bandwidth is shared on the coax branches, and a variable number of units can be sharing the same fiber link, which can serve a neighborhood, block, or even unit. And, so upgrades can make a network more "fiber-rich."
But is it still required though? Isn't this how Sonic uses AT&T lines? Perhaps it only applies to DSL, which is basically obsolete now?
Internet has yet to be regulated that way and fiber lines aren't considered the same as those copper lines.
Also, fiber to the home is done using most often a PON system purchased from a specific vendor and is a time shared medium. You might only get 1Gbps service but you also aren't getting 100% of the fiber to yourself. The home side device will filter information from your neighbors for instance.
There's always ways to do this of course but, it wouldn't be as straightforward as patch the fiber from your home in the same way that they did with copper lines.
It did make sense at the time of the law: carriers kept clustering around the major metro areas and wouldn't expand to the boonies. Nowadays, that law has outlived its purpose.
The TL;DR is that the cost of cell towers is mostly the same irrespective of bandwidth (e.g., hiring a technician to break-fix as parts fail from weather conditions), so carriers figured out they could "rent" their leftover bandwidth.
Most of the "cheap" carriers are simply slinging together MVNOs from all the carriers (e.g., Boost Mobile, MetroPCS). It creates a weird situation where you get plenty of signal on off-peak hours and (often) the middle of nowhere, but at the expense of having no signal in larger metro areas at peak hours.
I just checked the Verizon wireless page:
https://www.verizon.com/home/internet/5g/
It says $35/mo "with AutoPay and 5G Mobile plans". So to get this price, you have to have Verizon 5G Mobile.
My current cell phone plan is $22/mo. Verizon's cheapest plan is the "Unlimited Welcome" plan, which is $40/mo. Adding Home Wireless Internet to that plan is $40; to get the $25 price you have to have a more expensive mobile plan.
And of course, all of these are introductory prices. They are much higher after the 2-year introductory period.
The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2 gigabits
The variable costs--things like backbone bandwidth, paying for transit, doing node splits, etc are a smaller part of the overall cost than you might expect
This lower end of the market, though, is being taken up by Fixed Wireless (T-Mobile and Verizon primarily) for example you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25. My mom has it, and it's decent 50 megabit service for a low price