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This is the only thing I can't do without, and it's also the only thing I am struggling with researching. I wish there was some centralized source of rural areas with high speed internet.
Failing that...I would really appreciate it if you guys would just shout out random rural areas you know with fast internet. I wish to move to the country, don't have a lot of "needs" but this is one of them.
My folks live in the least populated county in Montana, 15 miles from the closest town (pop 900), and they have fiber to the home/FTTH.
I live between a town of ~900 and another of ~3000 and have cable.
Even when I lived on the Navajo reservation, in a town of a few hundred, I had reasonable DSL (15 years ago it was 6/3, not That much slower than what I'd left in Atlanta).
Generaly speaking, if you're in a "town" of ANY size at all, you're going to have at least a DSL option and a cable option. Doesn't really matter where you are. So perhaps start by picking a much smaller area than "all of the rural within the whole US" to start with. A state would be nice, a county or region without that state will get you a list of Every available option and links to how good/reliable those options are.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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Fortunately a FEW REA's are adding Fiber. (Which UK did 5+ yrs ago)
In our region, The Hydro Dams funded Fiber to many remote areas, and we have NO income tax (if you are looking for a place to run an online business)... Google and Amazon already built server farms in our remote regions with power and HS 5+ yrs ago)
My idea of rural is life on an old farm road ( with three farms still functioning), that is barely more than one lane.
There is NO school bus service for this road, and no winter maintenance. We get a lot more ice than snow so people really do need to know how drive to negotiate the hairpin curves at top and bottom of steep hills, lollol
I said that to say we have Verizon WiFi. It drives our cell phones and our internet. While costly, it is very reliable.
The old Ma Bell land lines are still struggling along on my road -- suffice it to say we ditched a land line years ago and so did some of our neighbors -- of which there are only 17
THAT is rural and there are areas even more rural -- of the grid might be the next level
We lived out in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a nat'l forest (but a state hwy passed by 6/10s of a mile away) and had dial up or satellite as the only options, still that way. My sister and her husband lived 2 miles from the end of the earth (as my husband used to say) and had dsl and cable options as soon as they came out. They were at the end of a long wooded road and last house before nothing but woods and then a boyscout camp that was used semi annually by the BSOA. That's in New Market, AL.
Hubby always also wanted to know why the terrorists in the middle of a desert could get good internet but we couldn't.
I am also looking for a small town with at least 1 Gbps fiber. I am only looking at locations western US.
The good news for me is that I live in a community that has 1 Gbps fiber. When I moved here it was a small town, and slowly became a small city and then rapidly became a metro area!! That is the reason for looking for another town, but I definitely do not want to give up fiber.
Fiber is really expensive. For my county of 75,000 people the fiber build out cost 125 MILLION dollars and counting since 2000. The entire amount was paid by county residents using "profits" from the local public utility district.
AND the state of Washington at that point decided that they were NOT going to allow local municipalities to provide fiber to the taxpayers so passed really restrictive laws so that only "wealthy" county utilities could afford to provide fiber. This is a so-called blue state and the Democrats were the ones that insisted on passing the legislation to severely restrict municipal broadband in Washington state. We do have the "best government money can buy" in Washington state.
The map posted by Brian is the best I have found for starting to look for rural areas with fiber. Since fiber is so expensive I would concentrate on those areas with Public Utility Districts or Rural Electric Cooperatives. Those folks already have the experience in building telecommunication systems and in some cases the money to actually build them.
Check carefully with the community for actual fiber connections. There is a lot of talk about doing municipal broadband,but much less action.
In eastern Washington, those counties with PUD's that OWN dams on the Columbia River system have the financial resources. These are Chelan, Douglas, Grant, and Pend Oreille PUD's. The first three have had fiber systems in place for over twenty years, while Pend Oreille County started building out their system about five or more years ago. Even there check carefully....after twenty plus years only 75% of the households in Chelan County have access to fiber.
Besides eastern Washington it looks like Fallon, Nevada and Montrose, Colorado have started building functioning systems.
There are pockets of small fiber internet in rural areas like Brian mentioned in Montana but they are almost impossible to find unless somebody posts information on a forum like this.
I do know somebody in Pend Oreille County that has fiber 35 miles up a dirt road. So it is possible to find it....and you only need to find it ONCE.
Good luck in your search....I suspect you might have better success back east due to much higher population densities than out in the rural west.
My town of 400 residents has great wireless broadband internet speeds, via Lake Country Internet. With a Microsoft server farm 1 mile away, there is a huge fiber backbone available. Here is a map of the fiber network for rural Southern VA.
More local for you, try Scottsburg, IN. They have a municipal wireless broadband network (C3BB) that serves the county. It was sufficient enough for me to work from home as a Project Manager.
Look up a mifi setup. It is like a cell phone but you use it for internet connection. It is a hub so you can hook up a laptop or xbox or whatever wireless to the internet. All you need to run it is cell service. I pay 55 bucks a month for unlimited service, I can play xbox games while watching a hd movie on my laptop my mifi does not even blink. So I like the service it works good for me. My internet used to suck out here in the country. I mean real bad it was as slow as dialup. Well maybe not that slow, but close. When I asked the tech. what I could do to improve my internet speed he said go wireless. So I cancelled the house phone and the crappy internet saved 125 bucks a month and got the mifi for 55 bucks, big win for me. Mine is a verizon mifi 7730l
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