Rural Internet (Part 3)

I’ve written in the past about our challenges with rural broadband Part 1 and Part 2.

Our farm is in unincorporated rural Johnson County Missouri about 30 miles east of Kansas City.

I work from home so good internet is a necessity.

Up until early 2023 we got by with a combination of several AT&T cellular connections though sketchy resellers, T-Mobile Home Internet (an LTE cellular connection), and Viasat for latency insensitive uses.

And Elon Musk’s Starlink still isn’t available here as of June 2023. And he’s gone kinda nutty of late so I don’t have a lot of confidence he’ll be in a position long-term to keep putting those Starlink satellites up; they’re in a low orbit that decays quickly and you gotta keep launching more as older ones fall out of orbit.

But earlier this year, thanks to the Biden administration and the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, Spectrum built out a modern fiber-optic backbone in our rural area. As far as I can tell they did all of Johnson County Missouri, which is fantastic.

I signed up and we got hooked up the week after the fiber backhaul along the road in front of the farm was installed.

We got fiber-to-the-house with 1-Gbps symmetric. It’s amazing. I have better internet at the rural family farm than I do when I’m at my place in Seattle.