We live in White Cross, Bingham Township, in southwestern Orange County, NC, the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We have only slow DSL from AT&T as an option for Internet access. This retards my home based consulting and marketing business and diminishes our entertainment. Slow speed makes it difficult to sync business files on DropBox for both back up. Watching HD quality video is nearly impossible, so that we are forced to continue to subscribe to expensive satellite TV rather than being able to use lower cost Internet services that better fit our needs. Such a situation this close to the municipalities of Chapel Hill and Carrboro that are courting gigabyte Internet is unacceptable and the direct result of lack of competition. Sadly, MebTel delivers much better Internet service only a couple of miles from our house.
In very rural, low population (20,000 for Letcher County, KY), low income ($11,500 per capita), mountainous southeastern KY where we lived literally at the end of the road near the mountain top, we have 6mbps down via cable. In rural Maryland, we had 13mbps down via cable. Southern Orange County is more populous than either place, so the issue seems to be more lack of competition than population density.
Three solutions occur to me.
a) We are a tantalizing 200 yards from where our phones receive 4G LTE. Were a cell tower constructed nearer to us, we could switch over to an acceptable 10Mbps down via cellular.
b) Expansion of MebTel service area, again tantalizingly close, or
c) AT&T stepping up their game to provide better service to their captive customers.
Isn’t about time that rural Orange County, North Carolina broadband, where the towns talk about Gigabyte, quit lagging behind Letcher County, Kentucky?
Art Menius 
There is also a big problem of NO internet accessibility in the northern (Cedar Grove) part of Orange County. I think it is both a business and an educational lack of equal services problem.
It is up to our county politicians to negociate better service for all parts of the county. The companies can’t just make huge profits in Chapel Hill and then screw the less dense areas. But they do that if no one speaks up for the less dense (and in some parts, poorer) areas of the county.
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Well said
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