Comment DSL Is Not That Simple (Score 1, Insightful) 332
While this is a common view of how DSL technology works, it's really only true in dense urban areas with relatively new wiring. The truth is that it's actually quite complex to transmit broadband signals over telephone lines, and any number of things can interfere.
For starters, in most cases the DSLAM has to be within about 3 miles of the customer, and this is not measured as a bird flies. Sometimes the wires may twist around in all sorts of bizarre ways depending on historical construction. This makes it extremely costly for telecoms to provide broadband outside of densely populated areas, since you're looking at installing a DSLAM and the facilities to protect, support, and maintain it for a handful of houses in some rural areas. There's no way for those costs to ever be recovered. Now there are some ways to cut these costs using remote terminals rather than full DSLAMs, but this still costs vastly more than the customers can repay.
Although plain old distance-based attenuation is the biggest limiting factor, there are all kinds of other problems as well. Things like the gauge of the telephone wiring can make a big difference, and many areas historically had signal-boosting equipment installed on phone lines which produces acceptable voice quality on a flaky line, but makes broadband signal transmission all but impossible. At that point telecoms are looking at major engineering work to remove that equipment without degrading voice quality for the affected customers, all before they can even think about providing broadband service.
Without addressing these major engineering issues first, the most common results of offering broadband to customers in these areas is that they get 1/10th of the intended speed and the service cuts out every 10 minutes due to attenuation and poor signal to noise ratio. This predictably results in furious customers and repair techs trying to patch things together on an individual customer basis, and usually failing since these tend to be major jobs that can't just be fixed with duct tape. So generally the telecoms simply don't offer the service in these areas because they don't want the hassle.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no shill for the telecoms. I know all about federal funding they've received which has gone to questionable use, and there are various things I think should be done differently. However, looking purely at the technology involved, it is not in any way a simple task to roll out rural broadband. Pretending it's easy won't help anyone; it can be done, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money. Even assuming unlimited funding I doubt it could be finished by 2012, simply because there aren't enough field techs/engineers to complete the vast amount of requisite infrastructure work in that timeframe.