In most of Alabama, the work of building broadband looks like a trench. A crew opens the ground along a county road, lays a line, closes it, moves to the next house. Follow that line far enough and it ends at a porch, and a family that has waited years for it.
In the hardest places the line never comes. The crew stops where the cost of the next mile climbs past what the rules will pay. The house past that point gets something else: a receiver on the roof and a low-earth-orbit satellite account. Served on paper. Served differently in fact.
Broadband is easy to take for granted once it arrives. It is how a child turns in homework, how a farmer files for a loan, how a family applies for a job no longer posted on paper. Where it reaches, no one notices. Its absence is the thing you feel: school and work and a paycheck that run slower, or wait on a long drive, or never come at all…