In some areas we serve where houses are a mile apart and the nearest town with a Walmart is 15 miles away, people tell me that when a homeowner dies (many are in their 70's and 80's), they won't even list the house because nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. It will be abandoned, or torn down to and turned back into farmland. We no longer have small family farms with the farm family living in a house on the land, because you need to farm so many acres to make a profit. If a farmhouse is near a town, it may become a rental house, but not when it's 10 miles from the nearest town or school.
But I expect some company will be awarded $15K+ each to pass these houses with fiber. If it takes 4 years to complete, the house might not even be occupied by then, and in any case, the 80 year old occupant probably doesn't care if they have gigabit Internet. So will fiber make these houses suddenly desirable, and work from home people will move there from the cities, towns and suburbs? Reviving these rural areas where the younger generation has moved away? I guess that's the vision, I'm not sure I buy it. Well and septic and propane, quarter mile driveway to plow in winter, but blazing fast Internet, and you can have horses and chickens. Will they start building subdivisions out there once fiber is available? I'm not buying it. Am I wrong?
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