As others have mentioned, you are pretty wrong here. The vast majority of AM towers are the radiators and the ground is the ground plane. Between them sits a huge isolator which is generally ceramic. If you stand on the ground and touch the tower above the isolator you will get burned or dead.

This makes colocating on an AM tower a PITA as you can't just run a conductor up the tower without a transformer. There are ways to do it, my favorite being to get power off of the tower lighting circuit to power a tower mounted enclosure and then running fiber off of the tower if I need to come off of it.

1. Required to do free peering.

With anyone? No conditions? The devil is in the details. I need some justification. Do my customers want to get to your content above a level where it makes sense for me to peer with you? Do you run a decent network that isn't oversubscribed? Lets say $content provider traffic over your network is crap, lots of jitter, loss, whatever. I can also get $content providers traffic from someone else. If my customers use a lot of $content providers service, then I'm not peering with you. My customers don't know or give a crap. They just know that their Netflix is crappy and its my fault.

2. Must provide, among other services, a basic FCC specified service at a set price with a fixed installation fee. Initially 1Mbps up/down for $10 a month with a $50 installation fee.

This would kill my company and any start up ISP. Your mile drop up to you house in the hills might cost me 5K to build. I'm not signing up for that. I can't build out anything for $10 per month. Not signing up for that.

3. Legally obliged to provide service within two weeks of any request in their designated service area, or face fines.

This would kill my company and any start up ISP. How on earth am I supposed to build fiber out to you in two weeks? How am I supposed to build out infrastructure to hit every house in an area with fixed wireless? Completely impossible.

3.1 Local governments specifically allowed by FCC to provide service to customers not any active ISP's service area. 4. Must tier service only by bandwidth and nothing else.

No real issue with the former, but the latter would preclude SLAs for business customers, DIA vs Best effort, i.e GPON vs Active fiber so I think your restriction is dumb and not well though out.

4.1. No data caps or overages. Throttling only allowed to temporarily deal with network congestion and must not lead to worse service than the basic FCC mandated plan.

Not the end of the world, but also would preclude a lot of smaller rural WISPs from ever starting. You have to have over subscription if you want residential pricing that isn't measured in thousands. Thats just how the internet works. With over subscription comes the requirement that you implement a fair queue method. That might be caps, overages, or throttling.

5. Must not filter any traffic except for security purposes, and those filters should be under the control of the customer.

I'm mostly ok with this.

6. Must allow customer to provide their own equipment, without additional charges.

This doesn't always work. I mean if you wan't to buy your own Calix 844G then I'm fine with it, it saves me $300+, but I need to control the RG side of it. You can't just expect that I'm going to put the resources into making your $whatever GPON device work. There are a ton of innovative deployment scenarios that just don't work that way. Take some of the Open Cord CPE implementations where the brains of the CPE exist in the data center. Your Idea just wouldn't work.

That being said, I feel strongly that ISPs are common carriers and should be regulated under something like Title II, abet with forbearance from a lot of the more onerous crap that doesn't really apply to us. Forbearance run by a bunch of people like you, or the current fcc, that have no idea what the internet is or how it works is a blade hanging over the neck of ISPs so it scares me. Things as they were under the open internet order worked pretty well, but there was always that blade hanging there and you never know who is going to have their hands on the lever. We do need a re-write of the communications act creating something like Title II for ISPs.

I have to admit that I see his point. Residential bandwidth pricing is based on the concept of oversubscription. I run a small local ISP and have seen sustainable oversubscription numbers move from around 75:1 ten years ago to somewhere around 12:1 today and am using 8:1 to plan deployments for the next 2-3 years. Equipment and transit costs have come way down, which have allowed us to keep pricing relatively stable while increasing package speeds, but as we approach 1:1 usage, there is no way to make the model work without passing on full bandwidth costs, core costs, and last mile costs to the end user. Around 3% of our subs end up costing us more in bandwidth usage then they pay us for service which is supportable for now, but as that percentage grows with increased full time streaming, we will either need to raise prices across the board, or start charging based on actual usage. What would be ideal, IMHO, is 95th percentile billing, i.e 10mbps on a 100mbps circuit with 95th percentile billing above 10mbps, but the vast majority of users just wouldn't get it.

Is that a 12000 series?

Your understanding is rather accurate but what your missing is the manifolds. You see, all the tubes connect to big manifolds with valves to control what gets sent where. At each manifold room there is some poor admin who is in charge of opening and closing valves in order to make sure that the right AOL gets sent down the right tube. In order to keep track of what tube to send your AOL down, the admin keeps a list of all the other manifold rooms and how to get to them. Some of the manifold room operators didn't have a wide enough notebook to write down the new directions so they just closed all of their valves and went home.

Perhaps they were just trying to load balance a 56k modem and a 10gb connection.

It wasn't just AS47868, it was kicked off by AS47868 sending real long routes like you can get to a by going through b, c, d, e, f ,g, h... and so on and so forth. Older versions of IOS wack out with the crazy long routes and lose their BGP sessions so it is possible that he lost half of the internet while you were on a network segment which was not seeing the issue. If the OP were to post the ASN or IP block he was on we could run BGP play and see just how much of the net he really lost. I'm going to guess about .5%.