You can watch whether this is working in real time: just watch NZ which has rolled out fiber to the home: NZ could be looked at as a rural area.

From what I have seen, for most people it means Netflix, and it has had very little impact upon NZ software development (certainly not a billion dollars worth).

Truely rural areas don't get fibre (too expensive per household) and often have no ADSL either (more than 5km from exchange).