Re: @ac - one sock puppet quoting another
A Cable TV company's primary product is television. For you to go to them when you only want broadband is like going to a grocery store and complaining that they don't have your favorite magazine.
Yes, cable in the US sucks. They have the worst customer service ratings of any company, across all facets of the economy. But you should ask yourself "why" - and the answer isn't because they don't have competition. After all, cable TV competes against satellite, and satellite coverage is ubiquitous across the US.
So why? Because people in the US have an entitlement attitude and LOVE to complain. Their TV service could have 99.999 uptime and they will still remember when they lost service two years ago and complain about it. Because while they WANT service, they don't want to PAY for it, so anything that do pay they complain about it. They want only a couple of channels, but don't know or care that a cable company is a DISTRIBUTION network, not a content producer. Content producers sell their products in bundles of channels, so the cable company has to sell you bundles of channels. You only want one, so you complain, and because you don't ever see the content producer and only see the cable company, you blame the cable company.
Of course, that doesn't mean consumers don't have legitimate complaints. Quality of service sucks, and sucks because they don't have enough money in the maintenance budget to maintain the lines, and farm out way to much to low-cost contractors because they can't afford to keep the full-time employees, and contractors (and employees who aren't well compensated) don't care about the end product.
As for not covering areas... well, companies exist to make money. If there was money to be made in covering those areas, then they would cover them. The only way to have them covered is to charge more - and they already charge as much as the market will bear.
If you decide to live in an area that doesn't have coverage, that's your fault, not the cable companies. However, it is also an opportunity. If the existing cable company can't service the area, why not start a company that will? That way you not only provide a public service by covering an uncovered area, you also get to make money from it. Of course, you would then find out that if the area could be served at a profit there would probably already be someone there doing that.