Surprise! Rural download speeds are worse than reported.

Nearly three-quarters of the downloads hitting Microsoft servers from nonmetropolitan counties are so slow they don’t meet the FCC definition of broadband. Microsoft’s county-level data shows a big gap between what the federal government says is available and what people actually use.Overall, according to Microsoft, half of the U.S. population, or about 162 million residents, did not use the internet at a minimum of 25 Mbps download. By comparison, that’s roughly seven times the size of the population that the official FCC data says does not have download speeds of at least 25 Mbps.