Let’s be honest about the rural broadband experience. The technology to provide very high speeds via wire require coaxial cable or fiber. Cable companies routinely bypass rural areas because they don’t feel there are enough homes to justify the expense of wiring, and fiber from telephone companies is fiction in rural areas.

The only way around this is universal service requirements mandating equality of technology deployment, which is going to have trouble getting through Congress because of the obscene cost per subscriber to fulfill this kind of mandate. The other option is deploying a robust wireless solution that can handle long distances and still deliver high speeds.

I think the latter is probably more likely to come in the short term, and Missouri would probably be a good place to run such a network because the terrain is more hospitable, but wireless will never be a solution in the mountain west states or Appalachians.

The inequity of access (and the much higher cost for rural America for the speeds you have to live with) is a real major problem for the 21st century economies. How can a business compete in a rural area with substandard service.

Perhaps future technological innovation can provide a better solution over existing copper wiring (which itself was made possible by universal service mandates from a far earlier era), but I’m not seeing anything forthcoming in the near term directed to serving rural communities.

No, what makes it hard to convince me is this. Before Suddenlink took over from Cebridge here in SW Missouri the max available speed was 3 megs. This was around a year ago. Now, even though I haven’t seen massive upgrades going on anywhere, Suddenlink is offering up to 8 meg. The only bandwidth problem the cable companies are dealing with is trying to figure out how to get more money out of our wallets w/o spending any of it on makign sure that the system is capable of delivering all the speed they promised to get us to open our wallet in the first place.