The US is making its biggest investment in broadband internet ever

Democrats are DOA at midterms, but it will likely be due to the normal pendulum of politics (backlash against party in power) and unfavorable demographic shifts.

This bill will lead to a bunch of rural internet being a lot less crappy. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be better than it was? Yes.

Do you mean 100Mbps?

I am quite dejected at the United States' ability to do anything that's both difficult and unsexy, at this point. Anything related to boring infrastructure (replacing lead water pipes, bridges, leaking subway systems, etc) just seems untenable.

There are escalators in the DC Metro Area that are out of service for months and years while they get replaced. I can't even begin to understand what would cause a 1 year long escalator replacement in this age of unlimited power tools and incredible amounts of supply chain efficiency, when it probably took 2-3 years to build the whole metro station to begin with, in the 70s (including the escalator)

In my area there are ridges that are consistently about 2000 feet above sea level, and none of them stick up above the others. If you build a tower at a reasonable height on top of one it can sorta kinda see into the valleys on both sides and maybe VHF waves can propagate a little into the next valley.

The ridge on top might be roadless so you have to build a road, power lines, optic fiber, etc. You probably have to run at least 1/3 the length of optic fiber to serve the towers that you'd have to run to serve the roads.

Wireless base stations are crazy expensive and the cost is only justified by the astronomical cost of wireless plans (compared to how much bandwidth you actually get.)

Fiber optic has potential performance that is 1000s of times great than the alternatives and unlike DSL and Fixed Wireless it has the range to cover rural areas. Fixed Wireless vendors have a long history of coming into small towns like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_Man

and only covering a small fraction of residents if any. If the market can support a scheme that's great, but the government has to stop paying for scams.

For instance we not only have a dazzling array of private health plans that may or may not accept you but we also have a large number of government plans and public-private insurance plans.

Someday we're going to realize that people still aren't covered under Obamacare and invent yet another new program. What I do know is that we'll never scrap something old or consolidate two programs into one.

We got to the moon by making a realistic plan to get all the way there and get all the way back. We didn't create a "public-private partnership" that would get the astronauts 80% of the way there and hope they'd be able to ride the bus back.

Any plan that serves a few people who are convenient to serve who aren't already served is just going to make the remaining unserved people harder to serve.

A realistic plan is that you can wrap an optic fiber around power lines and old-school power lines at relatively low cost.

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It's a fairly big problem that industry focused on the west coast has a distorted idea of what you can do with radio. Several million people have a line-of-sight to the Hollywood sign. There are no "white spaces" in Southern California, instead you can tune in 100+ OTA channels. The "ring of fire" topography makes it easy to offer services.

The 2 meter ham band is crazy crowded in So Cal and has driven people into the 1.2 GHz band. Even in NYC the 2 meter band is pretty dead in comparison. San Francisco startups keep piling devices into the 2.4 GHz band instead of the 900 MhZ band. They think 900 MhZ is crowded (it is in San Jose) but in most of the country 900 Mhz is all dead air. In most of the country about 10% of the possible TV channels are used.