I don't know if I agree with this. I cofounded an ISP in the mid-90's. It was in a relatively small town in a rural state in the midwestern US. I have no idea

I don't know if I agree with this. I cofounded an ISP in the mid-90's. It was in a relatively small town in a rural state in the midwestern US. I have no idea what the residents options for internet access are now, but at the time the only really choice (unless you were college faculty or a student) was AOL. But there wasn't a local line - you had to call a city 30 miles away that had a long distance toll charge. That meant we had a relatively captive audience. But, not a lot of people knew what the "internet" was then. At the time, our largest cost was the 32 phone lines coming in (more expensive than a residential phone line). Initial equipment for the T1 and the modems (sixteen 28.8 ciscos) and setup was only something like $30k. The second largest cost was the T1 (none of us took a salary). The issue was capitalization. It got to a point where additional significant personal guarantees were going to be required from people who hadn't had a salary for almost 2 years (I was making a little money making static websites). At that time the state telecom called and offered a little money for the customers and to assist in migrating them (I guess they were finally ready to offer rural internet access). At the end of the day, we might have been a little early to the market, we were under-capitalized, and we didn't realize at the time that if we had offered complementary services around residential internet access (we only had a couple commercial customers, more aggressive web development and hosting services, and a better idea in how to raise capital without more personal guarantees), who knows. I should add that I never wanted to be in the ISP business, I had an idea about a web based business (that I still think was a really good idea and I'm sorry that running an ISP and burning through all of our collective savings prevented me from doing) and was talked in to the ISP model by the people I went to looking for investment. TLDR: Technically, starting and running an ISP isn't all that hard. Probably easier today than it was 22 years ago. The business/economic side is the challenge.