Worth reading Tim Wu's "The Master Switch". He has a chapter that discusses the early history of wiring up the United States for telephony and how in the 1890s many of the early telephone lines in rural America were run by farmers (based on cheap "squirrel line" wire often just nailed to existing fence lines).

This is followed by the inevitable buy out of these rural telcos and the even more inevitable shuttering of what (for AT&T) was unprofitable business.

Wu, T. (2010). The master switch: the rise and fall of information empires (pp. 48-49). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.