Multiple Choice, Single Answer

Read the passage and answer the question.

Efforts to extend broadband internet to rural areas face a cost problem that dense cities do not: the price of laying cable per household rises sharply as population thins out. A company can recoup the cost of wiring an urban apartment block by serving hundreds of customers through a single trunk line, but the same length of cable in farm country might reach only a handful of homes. Government subsidy programs have tried to close this gap, but auditors have repeatedly found that funds sometimes go to areas already served, while genuinely unconnected communities are overlooked because mapping data used to allocate subsidies is often outdated or based on self-reported coverage claims from providers themselves.