I explained below how it is defined by me as rural; but, yes, it's rural. In fact, my primary home JUST HAD FIBER RUN in my neighborhood last month and I get 1 bar of VZW. So; if anything, rural is ahead of major metro areas (my suburb of Minneapolis/St Paul has just under 90K residents). In fact, DSL from CenturyLink or whatever they call themselves today is 6mbit.