I didn't want to put up a 100+ foot tower, so I started a rural FTTH ISP instead and ran my own fibre rather than pay the existing local WISP to give me crappy 5-10Mbps service.
Still, there are lots of cottages and other rural homes we can't get to and are trying to get Starlink at. The entire region I'm in has been stop-sell for a long time, yet there are zero uplinks anywhere nearby. I'd be more than happy to host an uplink for where we have dark fibre back to a data center to help increase capacity in the region, but nobody ever answers emails at Starlink. It's kinda awful how bad they are at customer service.
Starlink is only interested in colocation of their earth stations along major longhaul fiber routes, typically next to regen huts with existing Telco infrastructure. Just having dark fiber back to a medium or larger sized city isn't enough.
The level3 Prosser, WA hut site and starlink equipment there is a good example.
WISPs come with their own challenges; namely time and line of sight to another node on the network.
Heck I about bought a schoolhouse in rural Michigan until the WISP got back to me and told me they couldn’t provide me service because of the trees in the yard.
I've seen people erect light duty 60' towers suitable for the wind load of one 60cm ptp microwave dish for a link to a local wisp, can be $2500-4500 all in including shipping, foundation, concrete work, etc.
That’s all fine and dandy; I’m happily on the west coast again instead. Happy it didn’t work out! That amount of uncertainty when buying a home and working from is not for me.
Only if the fiber provider is in the same area doing a build to serve at minimum a few hundred other homes at roughly the same time. Some people who live in rural areas where they would need a 60-80 ft tower for wisp cpe or starlink may be in a place so far from existing ISP fiber that a new build purely aerial fiber construction project could run $300,000.
It's perfectly possible to do FTTH builds for 30-40 homes at a cost of $30-40k. Just make sure you know what you're doing and avoid getting fleeced by engineering consulting firms and high margin construction companies.