Picture two families.
One lives in a suburb of Atlanta. The other lives on a farm outside a small town in rural Kentucky. Both have kids doing homework online. Both have someone working from home. Both need a reliable internet connection in 2025 just to participate in the modern economy.
The family in Atlanta pays around $70 a month for broadband. So does the family in Kentucky.
That is not an accident. It is policy. And it is a policy that is currently under serious threat.
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Why the prices are the same
The Communications Act of 1934 established a principle that has guided American telecommunications for ninety years: every American, regardless of where they live, should have access to essential communications services at reasonable rates.
Congress reinforced that commitment in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, writing into law that rural Americans should have access to communications services "reasonably comparable" to what urban Americans have — at rates that are "reasonably comparable" as well.
This was not charity. It was a recognition that communications infrastructure is not a luxury. It is the connective tissue of a functioning society — commerce, education, healthcare, public safety. Allowing that infrastructure to exist only where it is profitable enough to build would have meant leaving entire regions of the country behind.
The Universal Service Fund — USF — is the mechanism that makes that commitment real. It bridges the gap between what rural infrastructure costs to build and what rural customers can reasonably afford to pay.
Here is the problem it was designed to solve
Building a broadband network is really about one thing: how many customers share the cost of each mile of wire.
In Atlanta, a single mile of fiber or cable might pass 500 homes. The cost of that mile gets divided 500 ways. Each customer's share of the infrastructure is small — manageable — and the business case writes itself.
Now drive three hours east into rural Kentucky. A mile of fiber might pass five homes. The same cost gets divided five ways. Each customer's share is 100 times larger.
The customer in both places pays the same bill. The economics behind that bill could not be more different.
So why didn't Comcast just build there?
This is the question that exposes the whole dynamic.
Comcast is a sophisticated company with access to capital, engineering expertise, and decades of infrastructure experience. If there were money to be made building broadband networks in rural Kentucky or rural Montana or rural Alaska, they would have built them.
They did not. And the reason is simple math.
Comcast has invested approximately $47.8 billion in its cable network — the figure comes directly from their 2024 annual report filed with the SEC. That investment reaches 63 million homes. Do the math and you get roughly $750 per home passed.
That is a number a business can work with. At $70 a month in revenue per customer, with a reasonable take rate and manageable operating costs, the investment pays off.
Now consider what it actually costs to build in rural America. The federal government runs a grant program called ReConnect specifically to fund rural broadband construction. The applications require operators to disclose their actual build costs. Here is what some of those disclosures show:
- Alaska Telephone Company: **$204,000 per home passed**
- Arctic Slope Telephone in Alaska: **$63,000 per home passed**
- Big Bend Telephone in west Texas: **$77,000 per home passed**
These are not outliers. They are what it costs to run fiber down long stretches of unpaved road, across mountain terrain, through permafrost, to reach a farmhouse that sits a half-mile from its nearest neighbor.
At $204,000 per home passed and $70 a month in revenue, it would take over 240 years to recover the construction cost — before paying a single employee or utility bill.
Comcast is not avoiding rural America because of indifference. They are avoiding it because a business case that does not close in 240 years is not a business case. It is a money pit.
The gap USF fills
Rural telephone companies — the small, often family-owned operators who have served these communities for generations — build these networks anyway. They do it because they are the carrier of last resort in their communities. It is both their obligation and their mission.
But they cannot do it on $70 a month per customer alone. Not when their infrastructure costs are 10, 50, or 100 times what a company like Comcast carries per customer. Not when a single mile of plant might serve five homes instead of five hundred.
The Universal Service Fund exists to fill that gap. It does not make rural operators profitable in the way Comcast is profitable. It makes the math survivable — sufficient to build, maintain, and eventually upgrade infrastructure that would otherwise never exist.
The family in rural Kentucky pays the same bill as the family in Atlanta not because the cost is the same. It is because the country made a decision — twice, in 1934 and again in 1996 — that the accident of geography should not determine whether you have access to essential communications.
What happens if it goes away
There is no version of this where Comcast or AT&T fills the gap. They have already made their decision. The business case has not changed.
There is also no version where satellite internet solves it completely. Starlink is a genuine technological achievement and a meaningful improvement for individual households in remote areas. But researchers at Penn State published an analysis in 2025 showing that Starlink's network can only reliably meet federal broadband standards when fewer than about 7 households per square mile are using it in a given coverage area — roughly 15 to 20 people per square mile. Much of rural America is more dense than that. And the more people who use it in a given area, the slower it gets for everyone.
More fundamentally, satellite internet is a service you subscribe to. Fiber is infrastructure your community owns access to forever. Those are not the same thing.
If USF goes away, rural telephone companies face a simple arithmetic problem with no market solution. The networks they have built over decades become unsustainable to maintain. Investment in upgrades stops. Service quality declines. Eventually, some operators will have no choice but to exit.
The family in rural Kentucky will still need the internet. Their kids will still have homework. Someone will still be working from home. The connection that makes that possible will simply no longer be there.
That is not progress. That is a broken promise — one that goes back ninety years, written into law by people who understood that a country is only as connected as its most remote community.
*Sources: Communications Act of 1934; Telecommunications Act of 1996, Section 254; Comcast 2024 Form 10-K (SEC EDGAR); USDA ReConnect Program grant disclosures; Meinrath et al., "Starlink Capacity Analysis," X-Lab at Penn State, July 2025; NTCA 2024 Broadband Survey.*