The rural telco situation is pretty good. In fact, better in many cases than what you get in larger cities.
The issue is there's some perverse incentives at play with the grant monies. For brand new neighborhoods you can expect state of the art internet being available. However, after it's installed, you can expect it to be simply locked in place with no upgrades.
A major problem comes down to easements. If there's a utility pole nearby then some federal regulations make it super easy for a utility to just add their line onto the existing pole. There are access guarantees.
However, if no pole exists then you are looking at buried lines. That means each time you want to cross someone's driveway or property you need to reach out to the existing owner to negotiate access. Some people are easy to work with, others will just flat out deny access. (The BLM, for example, is notoriously hard to work with for placing underground utilities. As are a few big churches).
The US, frankly, has the wrong model. Leaving everything up to private companies is what creates all these problems. The companies have absolutely no way to guarantee a route for service and they have little skin in the game to run an update.
At a bare minimum, the better model is to make utilities public (at very least the lines themselves.) That gives the government a powerful ability, the ability to claim eminent domain to cram through any improvement they need. You could still have private ISPs, but you can relegate their roles to just running the equipment (switches, routers, etc) rather than doing all the additional line management work.
The issue is there's some perverse incentives at play with the grant monies. For brand new neighborhoods you can expect state of the art internet being available. However, after it's installed, you can expect it to be simply locked in place with no upgrades.
A major problem comes down to easements. If there's a utility pole nearby then some federal regulations make it super easy for a utility to just add their line onto the existing pole. There are access guarantees.
However, if no pole exists then you are looking at buried lines. That means each time you want to cross someone's driveway or property you need to reach out to the existing owner to negotiate access. Some people are easy to work with, others will just flat out deny access. (The BLM, for example, is notoriously hard to work with for placing underground utilities. As are a few big churches).
The US, frankly, has the wrong model. Leaving everything up to private companies is what creates all these problems. The companies have absolutely no way to guarantee a route for service and they have little skin in the game to run an update.
At a bare minimum, the better model is to make utilities public (at very least the lines themselves.) That gives the government a powerful ability, the ability to claim eminent domain to cram through any improvement they need. You could still have private ISPs, but you can relegate their roles to just running the equipment (switches, routers, etc) rather than doing all the additional line management work.