First of all, I have family living in Bucksnort Junction, South Dakota. It doesn’t get anymore rural than this, and they have broadband. Where, exactly, will 6 to 8 billion take broadband that it already isn’t??
I’m pretty rural here in Montana too and seems everyone has it around here. Me thinks they have another agenda with this money....
To the people who do not want to shell out for it? Like digital TV, it will be imposed. When you are on dial-up and you have horribly low bandwidth, anything which is sucking up your bandwidth is noticeable in the performance of the link.
Usually, I just pull the plug and re-connect If I cannot account for the lack of performance, because anything is pretty well noticeable.
Impose universal broadband, and now 'they' (whomever) will be able to hack away at anyone not running a firewall, presuming they cannot defeat that, and not cause bandwidth performance degredation that is readily evident.