I've read articles saying AT&T is planning on abandoning their copper in rural areas when it fails and instead transitioning landline customers in those reas to VOIP adapters that will use their 4G network.  Here in Tennessee there are lots of hills and not so many people living around them.  I know one guy who lives between 2 hills and has no cell service at home.  When the landline goes down, he has to drive to the top of either hill where he gets cell service to call AT&T.  If they're paying so little attention to their existing network, I can't picture them spending a fortune to build the tower necessary to provide service to all their customers out in the hills.

That seems to be the grand irony of fiber - you can have a nationwide backbone with thousands of Gb/s of bandwidth running on your street, and as you said Jim - be a hundred yards short of 25 Mbps. I don't buy a ton of the 5G we're going to fix all the things but if fixed broadband could become a reality in the mid-band spectrum, there might be a new last mile in town (and I would move much farther out to the country). 

- Thomas Scott | mr.thomas.scott@gmail.com