It would be interesting to overlay a map of high service levels on top of railroads and universities. Naturally, the backbone of the Internet has to travel through rural areas to reach urban centers, but universities (especially research universities) were also among the earliest sites connected and they tend not to be in urban centers. Railroad right of ways are great for long-distance cables, so they would likely be heavily used early in the construction of the Internet.

Sometimes, a higher quality of internet service can be attributed to 1. Household is in-between two major cities, 2. Household is close to major highway (lower cost of building and maintaining infra), 3. Household is in the vicinity of a highly valued facility (E.g. military), 4. Telco designated the area as a higher priority on the subsidized list.

I feel like it's more likely impacted by simple time: rural areas tend to see changes at a much slower rate, and I believe a (very) large chunk of the infra cost is just digging into the ground, and by the time it's being done for a rural area, it turns out fiber has become fairly cheap to produce...

So when the upgrades do finally roll around, it's not incremental -- it leapfrogs 2 decades or whatever of technology upgrades. A single upgrade places you far ahead of your peers, creating the dynamic you describe (and yet, your peers aren't actually that far behind, if they wanted to catch up)

The same thing occurs with third-world countries getting first-world tech; they get it sporadically, and so see large jumps of change instead of slow, incremental shifts; this also gives a bit of an advantage, as they don't have stale infrastructure from the incremental change, and so can make much more extensive use of the new tech. For example, China skipped credit cards and went directly to mobile payments -- and with only cash to compete, mobile took over entirely.

And so when these rural counties finally see an upgrade.. they see rapid full fiber coverage. There's simply no competing technology in the area, since its so far behind, and fiber keeps the county prepped for the next 20 years of no upgrades..

With the amount of money Americans have spent on internet everyone could have 100 gigabit by now.

The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income. I know mine Frontier spends it all on interest payments for the service areas they’ve bought.

> The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income.

It is returned to investors.