Now that they have abandoned rural America? That implies they ever were in a state where they were not disinterested in serving rural America. In the late 90s and early 00s when I lived in a rural Kansas county, some of the towns in that county still had party lines to most of their homes. You can’t even do dial-up internet on a party line.
For any that don’t know, a party line is where multiple residences share a single phone line, call the number and it rings in both houses, if the other house is on a call you can pick up and listen in, if you pick up or hang up while they are connected to the internet it will likely disconnect them.
I attended a few meetings of the state regulatory agency that oversaw the local telcos and heard them claim that they provided adequate service to all Kansas residents to allow them to connect to the internet and anything better was simply physically impossible to provide.
We have friends who live up near you and have to travel into town to access a decent connection in lieu of sub-par cell connection on the mountain. They spend a fair amount of time at a certain brewery when on those ventures.
Not entirely true. I grew up and still live in the outer Chicago suburbs.
After college I worked for a time for a last-mile wireless ISP which provides porn to Jed Clampettes.
(OK, so realistically, a lot of the customers were farmers, and it was more regular web browsing)
There are a lot of these ISP’s which sprung up in the 2000’s once radio tech matured enough to be able to pull 2+ megabits off a radio link over several miles. It’s not at all price competitive with cable internet, but the infrastructure is cheap enough that people way in the country will pay 100 a month for 2-5 megabits because there’s literally no other options. Likely the speeds are better now, actually.
