Internet providers have left rural Americans behind. One county is fighting back

Private industry handling a public utility is never a good idea, see: Texas power grid

internet should be treated like water and power and handled by the city.

Aren't local ISPs essentially banned in a lot of places due to lobbying from the big players? Less abandoned and more actively stomping on its throat.

Vermont has several towns with as little as a thousand people that have fiber internet thanks to municipal cooperatives like ECFiber. Much of the state is a connectivity wasteland but it's really cool to see some towns working together to sort it out.

Before I moved back to the city, I used to use T-Mobile Home Internet in a very rural area and it was the absolute best internet you could get out there. It was about 70 MBPS down while the DSL in the area was max 10.The only other choices for the area was dial up, which was obviously even slower or satellite through HughesNet, which was super expensive and extremely data limited.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In the absence of service from companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter, counties and small towns in rural America could build broadband networks for their residents themselves, which can make the difference between prosperity and poverty.

A historic provision in the 2021 infrastructure act upholds this tenet of digital democracy: $65bn under the broadband equity, access and deployment – or Bead – program to connect rural America to the world.

Clyburn, wide awake with an opportunity before him, asked Bailey to donate 100 tickets to a tournament for local kids and a couple hundred laptops he could give to students in rural Clarendon county, near Orangeburg.

Sanford Bishop, who represents rural south Georgia, told him about football players taking the team bus to McDonald’s after practice because they could get wifi in the parking lot, Clyburn said.

Barriers in South Carolina resemble those in at least 16 other states today, which, in the name of a “level playing field” – a term coopted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) in draft language – keeps government entities from competing with private carriers, even in rural broadband deserts.

South Carolina hired Stritzinger away from running Revolution D, a rural broadband consultancy with a legacy of using real-world data to puncture questionable coverage maps promoted by internet carriers.

The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Where I live in Canada everyone thinks they need gigabit internet. My internet sales person was so sure that I needed at least 1 gig internet because I work from home and have a couple of people using YouTube at the same time . But I haven't had a single issue with my 500 megabit internet . That was the lowest I could go , probably would of been fine with 200 - 300 .

And not a mention about Starlink? To me it seems like the obvious solution compared to digging cables to an individual rural homes. Personally I use cellural but not everyone lives within the coverage of these towers. Satellite internet on the other hand is global.