And damn you for making me spend half an hour learning about peering, by the way.

here's a place that agrees with your $10k/month. However, they put $7500 of that as the gear and maintenance. They also list that price for 2010, when transit fees (wat) were $5/Gb, while these guys put transit fees at pennies per GB in 2016.

This is well out of my wheelhouse but I know when I call Comcast business services, I get local guys. Every conglomerate has a local office and that local office isn't a giant ISP; it's a piece of a network. We're talking about building a piece of a network.

Assume that $7500/mo hardware cost hasn't gone down. Assume you're still buying 10GBps. Assume you're promising your clients 50MBps. If you stone-cold guarantee everybody 50 (rather than assuming a duty cycle of 10% or whatever), you have 200 clients. If they pay $37.50 and tax for their connection (we'll assume a mesh network) you break even.

Obviously there's a lot of slush there. But I pay $35 and tax for 30MBps from Comcast and they're profitable. It ain't like they're making it up on scale.

Most of the complaints about starting an ISP relate to the rollout, not the network. If you aren't pulling RG6 or fiber to every house you're hitting, you're in a different place.

Like an Amazon place.

Not saying I'm right you're wrong - saying that I think Vice wouldn't go down this road if it were as hard as you think it is. I'm sure we'll find out what they missed soon enough.