I mean, Grass Valley is rural, but not "middle of nowhere" rural (source: fellow Gold Countryite). If broadband companies actually don't serve that town well, then they really have no good excuse. I also thought the target market for Starlink was boats and very remote outposts, not "minor towns that are just within civilization." It's shameful if ISPs can't be arsed to serve somewhere like that.
It's worse than that; I'm half a mile from a major Obama-era fiber loop with open access rules for any ISP to buy service there. There's no significant ISP selling connections to it. (There's a couple of tiny neighborhood co-ops like the Beckville Network.) Classic last mile cost problems combined with terrible regulation of the monopoly providers like Comcast and AT&T.
We have a pretty robust local WISP. But that's expensive and not great performance. Starlink is really my best option.
Point to point wireless is an underappreciated tool. Building a tower half a mile away and pointing a hundred small dishes individually at various customers with their own dishes pointed at the tower, might be cheaper than running fiber to a hundred spread-out houses. Assuming no coordination problems.
You just need a lot of extra signal slack built into the system if you want it resilient to weather.
