If you're one of those rare souls interested in discussion, sign up at individual.net. It's ten Euro a year (twelve US dollars or so), decent spam filtering. No binaries groups, but some of us view this as a bonus, rather than a shortcoming.

Throttling is dirt-cheap.

I work for an ISP that's probably comparable (wireless, so each connection is slower than a cable connection, but there's more of them). If you want to roll your own stuff, a juicy PC with two network cards and some layer-7 rules should be doable for under $1000.

You can also buy one of these, and configure it to do the shaping for about $1500, if you want a sexy rackmount unit and support.

They work quite well for basically everything except encrypted BitTorrent (and I'm sure that's just a matter of time).

It takes a decent amount of electricity to run that much hardware. That may not be the kind of "donation" the OP had in mind - donating to the local power utility.

Start competing with your employer. If they can afford to do whatever it is they do, and still just give away thousands of dollars in gear, there's obviously room for improvement.

I assure you, the 2003 USDA funding wasn't that bad. The real problem is that nobody else, generally, cared. The telecoms applied for grant money because they always apply for grant money; in most areas, they were only given grants when nobody else bothered to apply.

(Voice of experience. The USDA RUS grant is basically the only reason I still have a job. The wireless ISP I work for was given about $70k to broadband the hell out of a small town, population 800 or so. The penetration rate is still just under 50%, but those are the people that don't even OWN a computer.)