Yes, I read the article about the guy who got 2.6 million from the government to be ISP

Yes, this is a cool Ars Technica story. However, there is little to no location in Kitsap county that meets the FCC requirements for “unserved”. The FCC counts service and competition as follows: if there is at least one address per zip code that meets 20Mbit down, 1Mbit up, there is broadband available. If two different ISPs meet that, there is competition and no funds are available from the connect America fund (your USF contribution on phone lines), or any other fund. Addresses within 1,000 feet of a CenturyLink Central Office are able to achieve 30Mbit down, 10Mbit up over phone lines. This locks CenturyLink into being eligible to receive the funds if there are no other provider that qualifies.

As an example that will make you sick: in 2018, CenturyLink received $500,000,000 to serve 600,000 homes with 10Mbit ADSL2. Who the hell wants that? Only someone stuck with 1.5Mbit DSL from 1984.

KPUD goes through many hoops trying to get grants and other sources of funding to help defray the middle mile expense. We all watch with dismay as the incumbents continue to be eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars in funding but will not invest subsidized funds as the recovery time is much longer than three years due to how sparse our population is. CenturyLink in fact returned 100 million dollars to the government (after collecting interest for a few years) rather than complete the buildout they promised to do in WA state with the money. This is why we have community funded, publicly owned, service with KPUD.

We have to dig ourselves out of this broadband mess; it will never arrive at your doorstep for free. Our government has failed for thirty years to find a way to fix the problem. America has some of the poorest internet performance in the world!