It would be a strange turn of events for rural areas to become more desirable to technical people because they are the first to get fiber rollouts due to it being the only upgrade path for those areas.
No one in their right mind will plow the insane money into rural areas required to trench fiber to the curb. Meanwhile a quiet revolution is happening with point-to-point wireless, where $300 gets you a gigabit connection over up to 10 miles through a directional antenna that you point at your local water tower or something, where your ISP leases space on the roof.
Well that made me laugh since I actually build and operate wireless networks. Few things you should know:
1. When unlicensed wireless gear vendors talk about throughput, you can typically divide that number by 4 to get a real, achievable full-duplex throughput (because the radios are half-duplex and encoding and packet overhead accounts for roughly another factor of 2). So 750 becomes 150 which is an order of magnitude less than 1GBit.
2. That product has a range of roughly....not very far. You can do the path math yourself from their specs, but let's say it will work at full speed over 1Km. Not 10 miles.
3. To achieve the 750MBits they advertise you need to use 80MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 5GHz unlicensed bands. I will eat my keyboard if you can find a location with a water tower where that much usable spectrum is available.
To push 1GBit FD over 10 miles today needs licensed spectrum and 3' dishes with the associated high cost.
And this is before you have found an ISP willing to give you microwave access to their water tower POP (which they will not do since spectrum is so tight and they are using that tower for their own long-haul P2P links), and willing to sell you 1GBit transit for anything less than a fortune.
Thanks for the thorough reply. I've looked at how unlicensed links are set up in dense urban settings over about 1 km each, and encountered none of the problems you describe. But I can imagine they become issues over longer distances.
It's no more insane than the earlier deployments of electric infrastructure. The only difference is connection has to be made to rest of the internet at some point.
