I'm about as much of a free-marketer as you're going to find, but it's not administrative red tape that's stopping you from choosing between bunches of wireless

I'm about as much of a free-marketer as you're going to find, but it's not administrative red tape that's stopping you from choosing between bunches of wireless ISPs: operating one is really hard. The startup costs are immense. Satellite? You have to launch satellites. You have to get spectrum allocations (which aren't going to disappear in any regulatory environment; the results would be chaotic and bad for just about everyone, except maybe the purely wired services). You have to either subsidize receivers, because they're going to be more expensive than most consumers will ever buy outright, or you have to manufacture millions of them to get the per-unit cost down. And, of course, you have the backhaul problem. WiMax is probably the closest to being practical, along with cellular-type services, but it still has a very high natural barrier to entry: you have to get spectrum, you have to rent space on towers in the areas you want to serve, you have to somehow ensure that enough people are going to have WiMax equipment to be able to use your service at all. Again, lots of natural barriers to entry. Wireless mesh networks have significant scalability problems if the content most nodes want to access isn't evenly distributed around the mesh. A lot of people put a lot of effort into getting community mesh networking working back in the late 90s, and nobody could really make it work. And this was using 802.11 equipment (mostly) that didn't have any regulatory burden at all. 3G and 4G cellular are competitive, at least in some ways, with wireline services, but in many markets they're owned by the same company that owns one of the wired services! (That'd be Verizon.) So even if you have the choice between cable, DSL, and 3G cellular, your choice of companies might still be Comcast or Verizon. It's not regulation that's stopping these alternatives from existing, it's the inherent complexity and expense of offering high-speed data service. The regulatory burdens should certainly be kept to the bare minimum, but they're not to blame for the lack of choice in Internet access. Even in some sort of perfect, minimally-regulated market, you'd still be dealing with a very Hard Problem.