Fiber is not and probably never will be economical for rural areas. Most of the rural fiber rollouts that exist today are pretty transparent subsidy milking schemes.

I was thinking about buying 40 acres in the middle of nowhere earlier this year. It had no electrical power within a mile, but there was a buried gigabit fiber line running down the dirt road. It probably cost at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve fewer than a hundred people. I called the ISP to ask about pricing. It was cheaper to buy a fiber/phone combo than just fiber. Why? “We get more subsidies that way.”

Starlink is clearly a superior option in cases like this.