A lot of rural areas have backbone just fine.

It's the last mile that's the issue.

You can find gigabit business internet basically anywhere.

Woah, that's an enormous sweeping generalization.

I have a friend whose parents live in rural Kansas who to this day can't get more than dialup or satellite, even though they've called up every single semi-local ISP (way more than once) and said they'd be willing to pay for installation. At this point, they have more than $20K saved for the chance that some company says maybe.

It's simply way more complicated than you're making it out to be.

No, parent cited _business_ Gigabit. You're talking about retail consumer connectivity. Totally different things. Based on my deep knowledge of connectivity options here in rural Montana parent is correct: there's lit fiber all over the place (certainly to all cell towers) and various telcos will trench up to 5km from any of those pops, for a price. So a business looking to acquire Gigabit connectivity can readily access it. Ask your parents to call the ILEC business sales guy and see what happens. They'll need $5k/mo budget for transit fees and be willing to sign a 3-5 year contract.

I shall tell my friend about that. Thank you for the information!

There is also a website that documents where local schools get their internet from. You can also use those to find out potential providers. I'll try to find a link.

Found it: https://www.compareandconnectk12.org/

Rule of thumb for cable laying is between $20K and $100K per kilometre (0.609 mile) depending on environment. (Besides the actual laying, there's design, permits, landowner agreements, surface restoration, testing, certification, blah blah).

So your friend's parents' $20K gets them a kilometre of dark fibre. Maybe.

Edit to add: point-to-point wireless links might work better, but there again for a reliable wireless repeater you're looking at tens of thousands of dollars minimum in a rural environment. And in Kansas you're going to get bad Fresnel occlusion, so you need really big towers.

Just adding to this by mentioning the situation is similar in distant parts of Europe; there's a lot of areas that aren't served by anything but 2G/3G and where you can't even get dial-up.

Right, but many 5G technologies necessitate small cell size, which also creates a last mile issue.

Building towers is far less costly than going to peoples homes.