"I am not a techician but never understood why there was that big of a problem serving rural areas. The towns have high speed at reasonable rates and they are basically the same distance from any really large urban areas as we are."
Its really more of a business problem than a technical problem. The towns have enough population density to make it worthwhile for cable companies to wire those areas.
If they want to serve the rural areas, they're faced with running a whole lotta cable for relatively few subscribers.
The telephone companies probably would have never run their cables out their either if it wasn't part of their compact w/ the gvt in return for a monopoly.
There is a technical component for the rural companies.....you aggregate DSL services on a D-Slam which the longest you can go from is around 12K feet for standard ADSL and 14K feet for SDSL.....many rural areas do not meet this standard....
NeverGore :^)