A few years ago a Verizon employee was passing through my town, and he told us he was upgrading the local cell towers for 5G. Back then I always had four bars of 4G and I usually got over 20 Mbps, even out here in the sticks. When Verizon started offering unlimited data again, I dumped my crappy DSL service, which never got more than 6 Mbps and cost over $100 a month. I bought a Jetpack for my home internet, and quickly learned that my unlimited data wasn’t actually unlimited; Verizon throttled back by speed each month when I exceeded my 15Gb limit. I did that pretty quickly, because I stream video while I’m doing other things, and sometimes the videos autoplay for awhile after I fall asleep at night. There’s nothing better than using up all your good internet for the month on the first night while you’re sleeping.

And then came the 5G upgrade. The local equipment has been upgraded, but most people, like myself, don’t have 5G phones yet. Now I have two bars of 4G and I’m lucky if I get 1 Mbps during the day. Between 3 and 9 PM I basically have no internet on my phone, my Jetpack does OK, but the videos get pixelated and sometimes the streaming service crashes. Sending a photo takes several minutes and usually fails a few times before I’m successful. People send me links that I can’t open. Even messages with only text fail to send. There are major dead spots all over my town, where they didn’t exist before. On the highway, where there used to be dead zones before, they’ve grown much larger; one that used to be about a quarter mile long is now two or three miles. This issue is affecting everyone in my community with Verizon service, which is most of us, because until recently, Verizon was the only provider that had reliable service here. Now, it seems no one does.

The only conclusion I can come to is that like a lot of telecom companies, Verizon has disdain for its rural customers. Why else would you cut our service back to almost nothing? If you cared about us, you’d have found a way to do the 5G upgrade without ruining 4G. At a minimum you’d have reasoned that millions of tourists from the cities and suburbs — places you actually care about — visit here every year, jamming up our data speeds even more. You could fix that. If you won’t do it for us, do it for them.

Verizon has an opportunity to become not only the leading cellular provider in America, but the leading internet provider. The window, however, is rapidly closing. All you have to do is make sure your equipment can deliver reasonable speeds to all your customers and give us truly unlimited data — no more throttling. We would all dump our broadband providers, and without that monthly expense, we could afford to adopt 5G sooner.

Instead you’ve spent the last few years dreaming of abolishing net neutrality and prioritizing short term profits over transforming and controlling the entire industry. My neighbors are getting SpaceX Internet. They would have gladly paid an extra twenty or thirty bucks to Verizon instead, to get 20 Mb internet and a wireless router that can stay plugged in all day without overheating. Why in the world aren’t you providing that?

Once Elon Musk has his entire satellite array in orbit, do you think he’s going to stop with Internet, or do you think maybe affordable, satellite phone service is next? If I were you, I might be a little nervous.

You’ve made a few good calls lately; bringing back unlimited data at all was a long-overdue move, and your international service has gotten way better. I used to have to swap SIM cards multiple times a day when I was in Mexico — no longer. I appreciate the improvements. But it’s not enough. The situation at home is a mess. Fortunately, there might still be enough time to fix it, under good leadership, of course.