That "drive-by wifi" shows one way to get internet service to rural parts of Africa and Asia, without other internet access. One proposal I heard had a guy in a motorcycle going from place to place with a wifi connection to do uucp transfers once in range of each destination. The other related technology you should consider is "delay-tolerant networking."

We can get wired electricity to just about all homes in the US, and it looks like there's telephone service available to 98%. Adding wired internet isn't that much harder than those other two, and there is a Federal program to promote rural internet service. Who's going to build a network for 5 customers? Us, through our taxes.

Iridium and other systems offers global service, it's just very expensive. I find numbers like $5/MB.

So you're talking about at most a small number of American homes which won't be able to have basic internet access if desired.

Of those, how many are interested in New York Time's data delivery service over newspaper delivery? I can't come up with any number which makes it interesting to the NYT - nor any other newspaper - to provide this service. Your point about caps doesn't affect things because the NYT iPad app takes between 1 and 20 MB per paper, depending on the number of sections read. Even daily reading of the entire paper is only about 0.5 GB and an order of magnitude or two less than the caps I've heard about. Print media just doesn't take much bandwidth.

Even worse, your numbers only possibly might make sense for newspapers with a reach into large amount of rural areas. That might work for parts of Alaska, but it won't help, say, the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. 95% of Vermont people have broadband access at home, leaving very few left who 1) want it, 2) can't get the print version, and 3) can't get the broadband version.

You say "where there are enough people, there isn't enough bandwidth to give everyone a good experience." In my experience this is rare, even in apartments where I've seen a dozen or more access points. ef4 confirms that observation. The link you gave also states that there is overlap but "This artifact has relatively little impact on the majority of 802.11 functions." Can you point to real-world cases where people are having problems because of too many access points? Can you estimate how often that occurs?

Overall, I think you're having fun with ideas. That's great. But you're letting your vision of what you want - you want people enjoying the slow web, perhaps - take precedence over what people really do want, and trying to back-fit justifications without a back-of-the-envelope estimation to see if those justifications are approximately right.

Suppose I live in rural Wyoming with no internet access, but wanted it. The first question is why? If I'm a farmer who wants to get better market information, then a slow internet won't help - the information might come too late. Okay, you can fix that - have someone come by every day. Is that the postal service? Will postal service holidays and interruptions cause problems to a farmer?

Perhaps I'm a writer, who needs occasional literature lookups. Perhaps then I could use the service well (assuming interlibrary loan and similar services aren't enough). But who's going to set up that sort of service, with the research staff on the end to find a literature reference?

But as described, your proposals are wildly off the mark, because people don't work that way.