VICE can run this essentially as a “charity” or tax loss. The thing is you have identified the real flaw in this sort of thing, there are running costs to running an ISP even above and beyond bandwidth and capital costs of building out infrastructure even for the uplink area of a mesh network.
In theory cities could do this with tax and or low cost subscription funding and are probably better placed to do so in some areas because really running ISP connectivity only w/o services bundling is rarely going to sustain a business on its own.
