You could charge $60/month and assuming there are no marginal costs to providing service and everybody subscribes (two big assumptions) that would be >7% yearly yield. Not bad at all, actually, in ideal circumstances.
Those two assumptions are wrong. Charter’s (who I use as an example because they’re a most pure cable company) shows an EBITDA margin of about 36%. That means that just under two thirds of revenues get eaten up by operating costs. And that’s on average—maintenance costs will be higher in some respects in rural areas where you have to roll a truck every time a tree takes out a power line. You have to charge a lot more than $60 even if everyone subscribes.
Which brings us to assumption 2. At > $100 per month, most people won’t subscribe. (Especially given that, as a matter of local law, in many places you’re required to offer a basic cable tier for $20-$30.) Atlantic Broadband, which covers rural areas around PA and MD primarily, has about 250,000 subscribers, but is available to almost 2 million people. (At least on a census-block basis.) My 40% assumption was quite generous.
