Now my notion of under-served rural America might be biased. I have traveled quite a bit around rural America and by far the most people in under-served communities were on the poorer side. Now I did definitely see affluent communities with minimal infrastructure (particularly in California), but that was very much the exception (even in California).
> With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?
Your county would—and should—spend a few million dollars with some extra funding from your state and local telecom companies to drop a few 5G towers to pick up a few thousand more customers and voter happiness for sure. Your county counsel can call it something like Rural Broadband initiative and have a plan to bring a broadband connection to 30-70% of under-served rural households in the county before 2030. A good politician should be able to sell it even to city folks as serving the community.
Yes everything you've said about the possibilities is technically true, but it hasn't happened and there is no evidence it will happen. The RDOF has awarded another provider funding to bring fiber to within a few miles of my place but not directly to me.
Meanwhile I've been on Starlink since last February. I just checked and I'm getting 110M/12M with a 28ms ping time, which is 10x what I was getting for effectively the same price. Not only that, if I want to go on the road I can pack that little dish and take that bandwidth with me just about anywhere in the US. If I was broke I could pool funds with a few neighbors and we could split the cost.
With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?