>Is this actually working
Uh... no. Speaking from rural California, there are lots of dark areas in California. The telecoms spent most of their money lobbying Congress to change the definition of what qualified for broadband subsidies to pull money into slow satellite connections. Satellite has gotten faster, but latency and bandwidth caps are a still a killer which effectively mean you are not on the "real" internet as most Americans know it.
I've probably whined too much about this here in the past, but...
15 years ago we actually had a ultra fancy dual ISDN (yes, in 2003-2006) for a massive 256Kbps. I think it was about $250/mo which we split with the developer we shared a house with.
We tried satellite for a while.
In our case, we finally had to bite the bullet and switch from supposed 5Mbps satellite for about $80-$110/month depending on how much we got in overage charges in a given month, to $388.80/mo for 1.5Mbps T1 line. That is obviously not affordable for most households. Satellite is so bad, however, that there are at least four households in our neighborhood that are paying close to $400 for 1.5Mbps (so somewhere around 3% of houses have a $380/mo T1 line).
Reliable 1.5Mbps with low latency is almost like actually being on the internet, though God forbid that you want to use modern development techniques like defining a Vagrant profile or a Composer profile for a project and launch it with "vagrant up" or "composer install" and wait while you try to pull a GB of data through that straw. But in general, it works. You can watch movies and connect via SSH terminal and all manner of things that people do in the city.
Satelite on the other hand... 5Mbps (or 10Mbps) with huge variations in actual bandwidth, very small uplink and latencies of .6 sec to 1 second, you are not on the real internet at all.
So many services will simply not let you on with latency that high. And for things like logging into a terminal via SSH or working in the AdWords interface, satellite is not usable.
I think the telecoms should subsidize rural broadband Internet.
Meanwhile, not only with the telecoms not subsidize rural broadband, AT&T
refused to accept the Obama stimulus money to push rural broadband in California. They said "If it were in our business model to service those areas, we would do so without subsidies. Subsidies don't change our business model" (which of course is BS, because all sorts of other subsidies do change their model). The basic issue was that even with the subsidies, there wasn't enough money to made in rural areas and they focused on rolling out higher and higher speeds in the cities, because that's where the money was.
Also, note that there are other costs. All discounts I know of that you can get on your cell phone or satellite TV or landline are tied to bundling with AT&T broadband. So not only do we pay more for our internet, we pay more for our landline (we don't pay for cell phones or satellite TV) because of the lack of rural broadband.
And here's the kicker... AT&T doesn't need to provide a monetary subsidy. If AT&T would simply let Conifer Networks install a small transceiver on the AT&T microwave tower that supplies our landline phone, Conifer would provide internet at near market rates without any other help from AT&T (assuming the microwave system could handle the bandwidth). At our house we still might not get it, because it would be a WISP network... but they are sure they could hit 80% of the houses.
