Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America

The province I live in, Alberta, had a similar problem getting rural communities online. There are a few dozen independent wireless ISPs that cover most of the smaller towns, but the sticking point was getting a decent backbone connection out that far. The phone company was basically never going to turn a profit on rural service, so the government eventually paid to trench out >10,000km of fibre and build point-to-point wireless links:

http://www.servicealberta.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm

I can't imagine being cut off from the Internet so badly. These things take time to spread fully, though. It's hard to force it when our networks are slower and more expensive than most other modern nations in the world.