Even if DSL can get there, reliability of the connection in rural areas is often very suspect. A tree falls over in a winter storm, a bad crash that takes out an exchange box, a pole just plain falls over due to shifting ground, or maybe construction takes out a main trunk... these problems happen in cities too, but in a city you have maybe 1 km of infrastructure to worry about. In rural areas you could have 100 or 200 km of infrastructure just waiting for a calamity. Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users.
> Even just as a reliable alternative Starlink would be a big boon to rural users
Starlink is susceptible to cloud cover, rainstorms, lightning and other things that would interfere with signal quality (or render it unusable for periods of time).
Seems buried lines (either POTS for DSL, Coax for Cable, or Fiber) is the best solution. We just need to figure out how to incentivize it being built.
As someone who lived 50 minutes inland in Florida, no way.
Our DSL and cable options were limited, Comcast said they offered cable, but when they got to the line near the house, the signal was so poor they were unable to make it work without 50k in labor.
Then ATT came with DSL, the connection has routine outages for hours at a time. There is a technician servicing the DSLAM pretty much every week, there is literally no way ATT makes money where I used to live. Everyone owns 20+ acres, there's basically 10 homes in 1 square mile. And then the Hurricanes... Every 4 years all of the lines get blown down and it takes ATT 1-2 months to get it back online... There is way too many advantages for satellite in rural areas.
If I had to guess, there was over 200 outages (anything over 10 minutes IMO is an outage) in the 6 years I lived there.
GPON done properly is much cheaper to operate than DSL or COAX, it's just longer cables, less equipment, less real state, less electricity consumption.
Digging cables is what's expensive. You can use telephone poles for fiber too, but it exposes it to more outages. You can secure the lines with steel cables but that ads cost, and if you are deploying to poles then you were looking for going cheap.
