The only reason WISPs are a meaningful market presence in urban markets is because we completely whiffed the opportunities to regulate internet service early on

The only reason WISPs are a meaningful market presence in urban markets is because we completely whiffed the opportunities to regulate internet service early on. We could have taken the Chattanooga approach (municipal broadband) and gone national with it, giving us Romanian-level connectivity in every city bigger than 200 people. We could have actually held private broadband firms accountable to subsidy terms and buildout requirements, and there would still be enough fibre that we'd regularly trip on it when walking to the Kwik-e-mart. We could have used similar unbundling rules for cable as applied to DSL and we'd at least have competition on prices, caps, and ToS rules. Instead, we're going for WISPs because it can be deployed with minimum external consent. T-Mobile doesn't have to fight legal battles with cities that made guarantees with the cable companies over territories, or dig up everyone's yard to run the cable that should be there in the first place.