Back in the early 1990s I recall working on a system that downloaded Usenet news feeds over satellite. I worked for a local sysop at the time, and due to high

Back in the early 1990s I recall working on a system that downloaded Usenet news feeds over satellite. I worked for a local sysop at the time, and due to high long distance costs in Canada it was tremendously more cost effective than transporting a similar amount of bandwidth over leased lines. The rural area I lived in was only fed with copper T1 lines until ~1999 when a local group finally convinced the incumbent to install fiber with the promise of over $1 million in business from the local municipalities, schools and hospitals. Residential and business ADSL was purely a side effect of that effort. We didn't get new DSLAMs with limited VDSL2 service until summer of 2014, and it still took them a couple of years to fix issues with the copper and qualify more than a handful of lines.