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Our Charter Spectrum “cable” connection goes over a microwave link like this.

How do I know? Well, we had a pretty big wildfire a couple years ago that burned a microwave tower a couple hours away. The official response was that they couldn’t get internet back in town until they rebuilt the tower. Our internet was down for a couple weeks until it was safe enough for them to get back to the tower site.

> Long perplexed why they had canvas stretched across

Its a radome, used to protect the antenna from weather.

Microwave relay links predate spaceflight and even when comms satellites became a thing, it made (and still makes) little sense to beam regional TV/radio/phone up to geosynchronous and back, due to cost and latency. There was no good replacement to terrestrial microwave until fiber optic became a thing.

In a very real sense microwave relays are the direct descendant of the optical telegraph (aka "clacks" in Discworld lingo).