"Roaming" used to be a thing (I don't think I've seen domestic roaming in years). It essentially solved this problem, anything inside your typical geographic range was included at normal price, but you paid a hefty surcharge when roaming in rural areas. The problem was, you could accidentally or even intentionally travel outside of your network and get charged exorbitant roaming fees. It was really easy to accidentally rack up a huge bill and so many consumers were against it despite it being a "fair" solution, from an economic sense.