Outbound bandwidth has always been limited out here in the sticks and our inbound has only been "high bandwidth" for the last few years. For a while I was employed as a contractor and had to run all my own development environments locally and still do so I have more reason to not have an office at HQ.

- 2 x Xeon X5650s running Ubuntu as hypervisors and one acting as dnat router for our Starlink connection. Hypervisors include Asterisk, Invidious, staging mysql/dreamfactory, CIFS server. One trying to run yolov7 on docker with cuda on an external GPU. [edit] Forgot the Pihole kvm instance for all local DNS.

- 1 x GPD mini pc (4 core 8G Celeron n4100) with Homeassistant supervisor mode on Debian for Temp/humidity/pressure monitoring, AC compressor control, 110V AC Aqara Switches, remote Aqara buttons (outside lights, garbage disposal)

- 1 x Raspberry PI 4 iredmail running three SMTP/IMAP domains over Wireguard DNAT forwarding from Vultr public IP

- 1 x Raspberry PI 4 with 3x7TB USB drives for DNLA & CIFS

- 1 x Raspberry PI 4 with Octoprint on 3d printer

- 200AH lead acid battery bank with 12V/100A charger and 3kW inverter

The nuke-it-from-orbit approach works for me but ymmv: a default-deny firewall for the Windows IP on the default gateway with external squid proxy for Firefox. netstat -on | grep $PID to add rules to allow access per process for things that just have to get through.

I inherited a 1980's model AC/Furnace and controlling the AC at least is extremely simple and cheap. A 12V relay in the compressor housing activating the 220V switch, connected to another relay controlled by a Pi zero which is controlled by yet another PI zero with a $10 DHT 22. A bash script check the temp and activates the compressor via SSh when the temp goes above 74F. The furnace control hasn't died yet so I haven't bothered replacing it. Putting the cooling system on IoT total cost = ~ $100

What if you charged someone to build and install the same system in their house? You'd probably charge a lot more than $100, and that's what the real cost would be for most people.

Nobody has suggested professional installation though, the original suggestion was just a nice home automatic project to play with.

You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric company.

In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.

One way to get a static IP is to rent a cheap VPS, put wireguard on it and use DNAT to forward IP to the client PI as wg client. Works well with an NGINX reverse proxy on the PI redirecting traffic to anything on your LAN.