I am regularly intrigued by posts here or elsewhere that discuss ISPs, hosting providers and their respective service quality and prices.

It looks like outside of France and Germany, associations or “citizens-networks” do not appear to play an important or, at least, comparable role.

Is that so?

In Ireland which is a small market, There was a State monopoly which handled phone, mobile, & internet - inefficiently & badly.

Now it's been privatized. State monopoly owns the Infrastructure, commercials resell it's services. My internet (in the capital) is Glass Fibre to thye edge of the housing estate, and dsl from there. It comes in via the old phone line via an RJ-11 socket.

Citizen's networks are nowhere, really. The only place they made any headway was as commercial 'piped tv' where tv signals were redistributed in the 1970s - 1990s. They were mainly bought over, and There was never the infrastructure to support them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_...try_in_Ireland

In this country the government decided what was "best" for our fibre infrastructure. As usual, they had no f'ing idea.
12 Mbit/sec was marketed as "best in class"; recently up-graded to 50 Mbit/sec. And they can't even meet that.

What a bunch of idiots - now we are stuck with it for years.

Hereabouts, there's about 3 ISPs (I heard rumours about a couple more, one of which has recently been bought up...).
They all compete in collecting your data and selling you packages. All packages are flatrate and differ in maximum speed only (and sometimes paid channels and/or antivirus or some sort of "security package" included).
The cheapest is currently ~30€/month. It used to be closer to 20€ five years ago. But with information, administration, finance, communication and entertainment all coming through the web, they know they have us by the balls.

Internet associations do exist, some pretty venerable, but they do not offer internet access.

I know of no such organizations in the U. S. A. Most ISPs are started as television cable companies, although Verizon (a telephone company) is also a significant player in the market. The cable companies had a head start because they already had cable connectivity.

There have been instances where cities or counties in under-served areas have set up broadband and wireless services. Some have succeeded, but they have also usually faced opposition from the corporate providers, even if said corporate providers don't actually provide to the jurisdictions in question.

Since I have left Germany, I have no knowledge of associations offering internet access, only hosting of either mail, web, all kinds of http-based services or all together (like is the case with my current hosting at lautre.net). In Germany, it was different, as the state(s) itself (themselves) have initiated the foundation of associative networks, in order to overcome a lack of service and to have the population educated in the technologies involved. I have been part of two such associations, one was just conform to my previous description, the other appeared to be until I noticed a concentration of activity that included the Bavarian secretary of the interior and the faculty of psychology of the university of Erlangen, where most of the technology had been installed and managed. As my inquiries aroused displeasure and only evasive responses, I bailed out.

I am quite satisfied that the other network is still alive and kicking: https://www.franken.de/home/

Realistically, I think things have moved past the stage where internet associations are practical, for two reasons:

1. Today's bandwidth requirements demand glass fibre infrastructure, which is @£&$~§! expensive, really requires laying underground.
2. The hostile environment that the internet is requires huge bandwidth with security against all hostile actors.

Being a small country on the North West of Europe, we nevertheless have major internet trunks to the Divided States, Europe, and other places. Getting 10Gbps or 100Gbps out to where it won't be throttled is the problem we have. We have a lot of server farms here, because it's never really warm, we have the bandwidth, and they run cheaper here.

Unfortunately here in the US, the government is controlled almost entirely by corporations. The current chair of the Federal Communications Commission is occupied by a former Verizon executive. So, competition is not something they favor. For example, in my particular area, I have one choice for an ISP. Prices are set by the ISP and I don't know of any "citizen-network" ISPs here in the US. Prices are not terribly outrageous, but most of the ISPs are not in favor of upgrading their infrastructure to accommodate increased bandwidth because that cuts into profits. The consumer is left at their mercy, unfortunately.

Here, the almighty dollar controls everything, citizens be damned.

There's still this: https://www.free.de/
Not sure what they offer nowadays, but historically very interesting:

Darn
I had forgotten that one. When Free® (the company) was becoming important, the Freenet, Free® and Free.de were first mixed-up, then forgotten by many.

I'm kind of at odds with the question and the title.

The title implies "pay as you go", the question seems to ask whether or not there are community citizen networks, which to me implies free.

It's a tough market and as frankbell cited, the cable companies had the headstart.

What I've found with a recent change I did, was to find ISP only which supported solely internet, however since they're part of a cable/telecom company, they'd be thrilled to include those other services.

The point raised by peers, friends, etc. Is that in the US there are Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) taxes on CATV services. But internet is not taxed using that model at all, because it is not a broadcast. I'm not sure how/if telephony is taxed, but I believe it also is. Either case, the learning point from the "cut the wire" folks was that if you have cable only and you're deal with them is $29.99/mo, then that is your bill, no added on taxes of any form. And it is true. The other part of that is with competition, the ISP which I've signed up with did give me a fixed rate and a fixed price, but also touted their stance that they have no contract specifying that I have to stay with them for xx years or whatever to fulfill it.

The only thing missing there would be "on demand", as in I'd pay only for what I'd use.

That would be nice, and I suspect that will be a marketing feature to arrive next.

The U.S. cable companies are already struggling with streaming TV services like Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc. But I can say that they still haven't broken from their habits. This provider I just got, said, "Hey, do you use any streaming TV services? If so, we have a package, and we can give that to you for xx/mo ..." I evaluated it, and said OK. It had the channels I'd like, etc. Why not? Suddenly I'm getting sent a set-top box and so I called. Basically you cannot have their "streaming" TV without said set-top box, even though all your smart TV's and computers can just run their app and stream TV. As a result, they "would" be charging that F.C.C. tax, along with some rental fee monthly for the set top box. So say it was $19.99, or $29.99. Well, it wouldn't be. The box would cost you like $7.99/mo and then taxes et al would raise it upwards of $12-$15 on top of the offered "cheap rate". So yeah, I found myself visiting their offices and returning the set top box, saying "Internet ONLY". At least the person there knew that their companies billing structures/policies were not ideal, so they didn't get into it by way of trying to push sell some more.

This is why I feel that over time these companies are eventually going to have to settle upon a different market strategy. No one is going to still be willing to pay for what they call CATV services and taxes with all the streaming online offerings. Obviously the young households getting established know little of a wired phone, and largely they care more about internet versus some bunch of TV channels. I've found that the biggest barrier is sports. If someone wants to watch them, then either they can subscribe to the bouillabaisse of specific sport related offerings directly from the leagues (costly) or find a streaming service which carries the sport types/leagues which they want to watch. Until about the last year or so, it was not possible for the second option, but this has changed.

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Yeah, the title is all wrong but we know what we're talking about

I don't like the wire cable approach: What was good for tv networks at a few hundred Mhz doesn't have the bandwidth today. Coax is too slow. Only Glass Optical Fibre does it. Pushing tv at you is effectively selling you their surplus bandwidth.

I don't see what everyone wants (pay as you go) coming any time soon, for one simple reason: Costs are in infrastructure & repair. Bandwidth is cheap. You'd lose money with people not using enough. A monthly rental is important.

You need glass fibre. That cannot be bent. Joining it is extremely difficult. Ships laying undersea cables from Ireland to the Divided States paid huge fortunes to a few techies whose task it was to join cables end to end in time for the junction to be rolled out. If it wasn't joined, it was a catastrophe, as the ship couldn't stop.

I don't see the optimum system for households coming either, i.e. a glass fibre pass through with a plastic fibre (POF) take-off. You get 100 metres on POF without a repeater, and you can bend it and wire it into a house. A router with a good POF feed could get you serious bandwidth. But they probably couldn't handle THAT up stream.

The title is alright.

sud-ouest2.org is a pay-what-you-want mail-hosting service, an association of enthusiasts, like with my own hosting at lautre.net.