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A fiber and 4G/5G station won't work for such scale community?

There aren’t any mandates to provide service, so it’s hit or miss.

My parents live in a town where the local franchise agreement allows the cable company to cover whatever they want. The company opted to cease maintenance of cable on their road. So their options are spotty 4G service or rolling a DIY wisp with a friend across the valley in a more civilized town.

Correct. These places aren’t getting fiber or strong 4G/5G connections. Have you visited rural towns?

I live outside of a rural town on 29 acres and my 4G gets 4Mpbs and my WISP provides 20Mbps. It’s no Google Fiber, but it’s enough to let my wife and me both work remotely and be on video calls most of every workday.

That said, I just signed up for Starlink because it’s faster and cheaper than my WISP, and hopefully more reliable. Right now we get a few minutes of dropped connection a few times per day.

The WISP reliability shouldn’t be that bad. (It’s not the radio’s fault.). Either there’s a tree branch or flimsy pole breaking the connection in the wind, or some backend network issue.

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