Yes, you make a very strong point. It seems the highest bidders in the city were able to work with city planners to lay their cable lines... while in the rural areas (where I grew up) there were not enough customers to justify modernizing old telephone wire.

The response to COVID-19 has been an expectancy on equal access to Internet and either the telco gets to capitalize on their geographic monopoly or the rural folks get short changed with 1980s dial-up or GEO satellite link.