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So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

Data caps and throttling make it prohibitively expensive.

I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas

There's actually resellers that are made for rural areas with unlimited data. They are quite expensive, but not several hundreds of dollars expensive. I'm pretty sure I have seen some less expansive but here's one: https://unlimitedville.com/plans

For a year my family used 4G as our home internet (this was around 8 years ago). At the time it was incredibly expensive because you pay by the gig used, and the pay scale is built around using a couple of gigs. Watching a couple of episodes on netflix bumps you into a higher tier for the month. Downloading and then uploading a single 1GB artifact for work could bump you up 2 tiers. I've looked around a bit, and the situation doesn't look much better today; you can pay for a certain data cap, and then pay something like $10 / month / GB over that.

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