There was an interesting interview with Comcast CEO the other day where he said, "[We] don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated.”
But then he attempted to shift the blame to content providers:
"Roberts followed up this statement by saying that Comcast is mostly hated because 'it’s the company consumers have to deal with when other companies raise their prices.'"
They generally offer better pricing for faster speeds with less BS, ie no monitoring, ad injections, throttling, etc.
You will have to look for ones in your area, but they are there. Usually each major city will have a few. Rural areas will tend to have more WISP's (wireless isp's) that are also small and all about their customers.
The recourse is to call your Senator and Congressman and demand they force big ISP's to lease fiber/copper to smaller companies, much like phone-line providers are required to lease their copper to other companies. This will help spur competition, which means everyone wins.
In the Milwaukee market we all focus on business users (and generally ones that need symmetric or high-upload service and would be looking at a fiber build) or MDU applications because... For the past several years we've seen a consumer preference for absolute lowest cost over quality or available bandwidth. At the extreme end we still have users on wholesaled ILEC DSL on provisioned for 768k download that just don't care enough to upgrade or switch because they like the sub $20 price. It's ILEC controlled so I can't just upgrade them out of the goodness of my heart either.
The participants list for our little Internet Exchange is somewhat workable as a directory of area independent ISPs although some of us are datacenter operators or as far away as Racine or Madison: http://www.mkeix.net/
Home users demand the world for $19.99 a month and no contract. Therefore, they get terrible Comcast / TWC / ATT (essentially, they get what they asked for).
There are a lot of people trying to run the "independent ISP" gauntlet, all over the US. (And I'm biased, as I am one of them). But those consumer prices usually only work if you offer bad/slow service, have a complete monopoly, or have government subsidy.
Since most Independents don't have or won't do most of those, they have to focus on business, as those are (usually) the only people who care enough to put actual money into service.
I would love to get a ~50mbps line to my home, from a reliable local ISP with clue. I'd pay around $150/mo for such service, and I'm not one of those guys that runs stuff maxed out 24x7.
There just are no options where I live for that amount of bandwidth other than Comcast. So instead I have my primary comcast line ($120/mo) which is 150/20, and a backup DSL line from USWest/Qwest/Centurylink/whatever they are calling themselves today. I believe that one is 20/2, but it sucks so bad (seriously no 1500 MTU still? sigh.) I rarely use it even for failover anymore. LTE is faster.
Generally speaking, multipoint access technologies (including cell & fixed wireless/wimax, DOCSIS, and multi-user fiber such as GPON) have a fixed amount of spectrum/timeslots to allocate for transfers. Transfer timeslots are allocated primarily for downlink (I use 75% down) because the vast majority of user traffic is download so it just makes sense to allocate that way.
On the business side it is one way to segment your customer base between business/pro users and residential users because residential users don't care and businesses are less price-sensitive. When they need more upload they are often willing to pay for dedicated symmetric connections such as TDM circuits or ethernet over fiber (the industry term is "Active Ethernet"). In theory these circuits cost more to provide because the last mile isn't shared with other users.