But, why is universal wired broadband in very rural areas of the US an unreasonable expectation? We did the same thing 100 years ago with universal service requirements for telephone. As I understand it, the build out was subsidized by the government along with a universal service fee for all phone lines.

Is the infrastructure for low-broadband in low density areas inherently more expensive than POTS infrastructure was 75-100 years ago?

Things are of course a lot different than they were 100 years ago. Bringing electricity and phone service to farms and ranches probably seemed pretty important. I'm not sure how a lot of modern coastal urbanites would feel about a very expensive project to bring wired broadband to everyone living on the side of a mountain somewhere today. (Especially given that wireless technologies are an option for a lot of people, if not everyone.)

As one of those coastal urbanites, fucking great. Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway? Even aside from that the internet is great, I'm not going to feel bad about helping to pay to bring it to everyone.

I don't even really disagree. I just see a lot of hostility on here about providing infrastructure for people who aren't in metros. I'm not convinced that in this day and age it all has to be wired. But it's not unreasonable to consider that at least reasonable Internet should be a basic utility service even for very rural locations.

> Didnt we already pay a bunch of money for that anyway

No? The process to transition the USF to covering broadband didn’t even start until the tail end of the Obama administration.

We paid for universal broadband too, we just didn't get it or the money back.

In general, problems are caused by people, policy, or technology. I think you hit on a people+policy misalignment.

Some of that is starting to change in the rural South. Georgia changed laws to allow electrical coops and cities to run their own loops. Alabama is also pushing money into local rural fiber builds.

An example, in Carroll County, GA I live outside of Carrollton, GA and have 2 fiber options 1) Charter/Spectrum which I use 2) CarrollEMC/Crossbeam which looks like they just dropped fiber on our power pole within the last month. If you look at the FCC map of Highway 5 it correctly shows ATT DSL availability, incorrectly shows Comcast coax availability, and does not show either Charter/Spectrum or CarrollEMC/Crossbeam. There is only a process to challenge availability on the FCC map, like Comcast...that incorrectly shows availability, and no option to add new providers to the map. It is left up to the provider to claim availability.

Arkansas has also removed some of the barriers for electric coops and municipal broadband, but change has been slow.

There are now plenty of rural areas with symmetrical gigabit broadband available, while most cities are stuck with whatever pitiful options Cox or ATT decides to bestow.

Tennessee did as well. There are still limits but coops can serve inside their boundaries but cannot compete against a telephone coop.

75-100 years ago coincided with the tail end of a massive boom of dirt poor immigrants from Europe. Labor was extremely cheap relative to other things in the economy. It’s vastly more expensive now. It’s the same story as almost all our infrastructure. We couldn’t build the New York subway today either.

> It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas.

I don't know why. It seems incredibly realistic to expect wired broadband in most rural areas. (We were able to provide them with power lines and telephone lines over 60+ years ago, there's no reason fiber would have to be any different)

I’m not sure I understand why broadband should be a problem anywhere there’s electrical infrastructure.