Rural Americans Are Rebooting the Spirit of the Internet

Today there are nearly 900 rural co-ops still providing their communities with electricity. A DIY success story! Now history repeats itself—with broadband. Thirty-nine percent of rural Americans had no access to home broadband in 2016 (compared with 4 percent of folks in urban areas), because big telcos say it’s too expensive to build affordable fiber-optic broadband in the countryside. Residents have to make do with dialup or Wi-Fi from a library. So co-ops are solving the problem again.