There IS rural demand
I own a computer service in small town in southern Missouri USA. My experience is that the rural people who care about broadband are chomping the bit to get it. I think what the survey fails to address is that many people don't understand what they're not getting.
When we first opened our shop in this town, we had no broadband available except Satellite (terrible direcway/hughes service to boot). Our local phone company wasn't in a big hurry to roll DSL out either, siting that there was no demand; They had a "list" that you could "sign up for" that no one ever saw. The problem was that the people didn't know what they were missing. It was the "if you build it, they will come" scenario. Once they FINALLY rolled out DSL, and the locals realized what they were missing, they started switching over. Once people switch to broadband, they almost never go back. It also helped that the local dial-up providers' services started to go in the toilet as well with terrible (even for dial-up) connection speeds, hangups, local number changes and what have you.
Most of my rural customers that can't get broadband KNOW what they're missing because they see my speeds here, or have friends in town that have it, and therefore they want it too. There's always going to be people that don't care about internet. I'd say that those people probably don't even have dial-up anyway. And since population density in rural areas is obviously lower, there's less potential payoff to the internet provider in the short term to recover equipment costs etc, so there's less incentive to roll broadband out. But the demand is there.
