No communication networks -- people in underserved areas are crying out for fiber or anything better than DSL. It's not clear anybody really wants more electric lines or pipelines but very clear that people want better internet.
I don't know what the situation is now but a few years ago I couldn't get DSL (too many feet) while I watched them bury fiber about 2.5 miles away (the fiber was adding capacity to the nearby town). So at such a grand scale, a fiber map probably wouldn't really show many of the under-served areas.
I was using 3g, I bet 4g is currently the best option.
4g can be a good option, but in many places in the U.S. there are hills and trees in the way. For instance the "Appalachin Mountains" region is where wireless goes to die.
To an incredible degree, too. The Sprint commercials about basically being the same are true almost everywhere I've been in the past few years, so I've been using project Fi (Google's service) for a while. But every time I travel back to VA, I'm thrown back into a world of hunting for signal that I'd almost forgotten.
It's really bizarre. Where my parents live, I can be almost line-of-sight to a cell-tower operated by my carrier (literally visible across the valley, two miles away), and I get barely two bars, with calls flaking out constantly. And forget about data.
In what way is it clear that people want something better than DSL? The carriers lose money rolling out fiber even in urban areas, in part because they're required to make it accessible to lower-income families that don't want it.
Hell, I'm in the industry and not sure what I'd really get from something better than the DSL I have today.
At my town hall they have a packed crowd whenever the topic of internet service comes up. Even the "fiscal conservatives" on the town board shut up about it being something we can't afford, which they almost never do.
If your DSL is 24 mbps that is not so bad, but many people are stuck at 2 mbps or worse.
In my rural neighborhood (somewhere in the Netherlands) we created a cooperative that will create and manage a fiber network for 5.600 households, spread in a 345,8 km/2 area. The large Telcos are ignoring us, so we have to do it ourselves.
In this area everybody has at least ADSL but speeds range from 2Mbit to 20Mbit. There are also a couple hundred households on Cable (max. 150/20).
With Fiber everybody will get a 100/100 connection for about 50 euros / month. Other packages are available, up tot 500/500.
Even though the people with 20Mbit and up don't complain about their connection a large part of them signed up for Fiber anyway.
Why?
Because we told them that if we fail to build this network, the people with ~2Mbit connections are screwed. Out of solidarity 65% of all households signed up, 2 years before they would be able to get it, resulting in a valid business model for the cooperative.
