I am not trying to defend the telephone or cable companies here, but there are realities to bringing service to a subscriber. One reality is that it costs a tremendous amount of money to build out service to a subscriber, often money that will NEVER be recovered unless there are enough subscribers that maintain service over a period of many years. Keep in mind telco subscribers are busy canceling their services by the thousands every day. Many of us brag about how we are "dropping the phone company" every day. The phone companies are in a death spiral as it relates to universal service to rural subscribers.
What makes those of us that live in rural areas think we are "owed" some kind of service anyway? We have never payed our way. The only way telco's could survive and provide for rural service is by having the urban services be profitable to subsidize the rural services. With the proliferation of mobile phones the urban dwellers have dropped their land line services like flies on an frosty October morning. The death spiral is that as the service becomes worse more and more subscribers will leave.
As for having "fiber nearby" and why can't I get on the fiber?. Having a fiber optic trunk cable running by you door means NOTHING. All the fibers in the cable are likely in use with high speed DWDM circuits and ther is NOTHING there for ANY subscriber. This is not like a water or gas pipe, you cannot Just "tap in" and get some service. A DWDM terminal to be built could easily cost a million dollars and I am sure you as a single subscriber would be willing to foot the bill for that construction right?
No, we all want good service, but we are going to get worse and worse service from here on out from telco's as they continue to shift their focus from servicing individual subscribers to servicing the cell phone towers, and long haul point to point circuits.
Guys, things are not like they used to be 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Hopefully the cell phone providers will get more towers built (at least a million dollars per tower) and provide data and voice plans for rural users, or satellite technology will get better, or perhaps cable operators will build out a bit further to get to some of us ( I am fortunate to have high speed cable service) but don't expect too much from your local telco going forward, as they are struggling to survive and shifting focus into services and opportunity's that will allow them to survive.
Again I am not apologizing for any telco, and am no longer associated with any of them, but having a telco background I do understand some of the issues.
