Joey Bahr walks out to the front of his yard along a blacktop county road. He stops in a ditch and points to an orange-and-black sign that marks a buried fiberoptic cable. But for Bahr, the cable running beneath his feet is off-limits. It’s owned by a neighboring internet service provider and is merely passing through on its way to a nearby town. “It’s just maddening,” Bahr said. “We’re at the end of the line basically.” Bahr’s story illustrates just how out-of-reach broadband remains for tens of millions of people in rural America. Nearly 9% of Kansas households — roughly 130,000 — still don’t have access to high-speed internet. Yet the promise of a future with broadband for all Kansans, no matter how remote, might rest in the wide-open skies over the Bahrs’ home — and a plan to send Wi-Fi to a future Mars colony.
Source: Hutch News.
