If you're not familiar with Frontier -- they currently aren't profitable and recently filed bankruptcy. Their network consists mainly of the old rural systems that the big telecoms didn't want due to a lack of profitability. The big and profitable telecoms have concentrated their service to denser areas, and pulled out of lesser profitable rural areas entirely, even though they had a monopoly in those areas.

Their bad service is not the result of a lack of competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model. It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to solve this problem without subsidization of rural internet.