Re: Have and have nots@ M Mouse
I grew up in the most rural parts of the countryside when I was a kid. Our nearest neighbour was 1 mile away, the village itself - no pub, no shop, 1 church - was 2 miles from them. When I was a kid, most of the people in the village worked in farms around the village, or in the market town a few miles further. There were a lot more farms then, as well as lots of small-holding.
Fast forward to today, virtually no-one works on farms anymore in our area, since it is mainly agriculture, produce/grains/feed, not much livestock - with modern machinery this means only needing a few people to man massive farms. All the small-holdings are gone, whipped together into larger farms.
Nowadays, there are more people living in the village, but none of them work there. They don't even work in the market town, they work in the country town and commute to and fro by car each day. There is no reason for most of this people to live here, apart from the idyllic countryside.
They all get what I would call reasonable broadband - even my old man right on the outskirts of the village, 7km as the crow flies from the exchange (in another village), gets 3.5 MB.
This is their choice, they choose to live in the village with no pub, no post office, and shit internet. I can say this with confidence, because a house in the village is vastly more expensive than the equivalent property in town.