Well, any breakdown is a pain. Better the farmer spends HIS time, or his kids' time (they'd love the opportunity to tear back and forth with the four-wheeler or the gofer pickup) between the computer, which will probably be in the barn these days anyway, and the tractor out in the field...
...then to sit and WAIT for the geek to show up in the Geek Squad truck and look geekily at it. There's savings there.
And not every place is as isolated as North Dakota. That's probably the broadest least-populated area outside of Alaska or Nevada...maybe Arizona. (waves of crossing illegals notwithstanding) There's no point in putting in service if there's no one there who NEEDS service. Doesn't make sense to have a cell-phone tower that is in the range of two farm families and 100 head of cows, and nothing else.
I don't know. I don't like this, one damn bit...but given that Government Hath Commanded, it would seem there'd be a more-reasonable way to make the great god government happy.
I joked with the AT&T people about how I could use their coverage map in oil exploration, well over a decade ago--where they had no service, that's where we drilled. The whole Bakken boom left the sidewalk signal crowd behind up here, and those thousands of production locations have people out there daily, reporting problems, ordering parts and services, on Verizon phones.
In between those thousands of production locations, and a scattering (now) of drilling rigs, there are farms and ranches who depend on those phones, too.
Now, I understand that isn't as hot a market as New York City, where a single block can have more people than a whole county out this way, but they aren't growing food in NYC at the rate they consume it, where we have a surplus. But that takes space.
The whole problem is that the law precludes the farmer working on the damned thing. That's the basic problem. Which is back to the service tech visiting the tractor, or the tractor visiting the service tech.
Maybe we'll just have to go back to these:
