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.
We have a pretty robust local WISP. But that's expensive and not great performance. Starlink is really my best option.