For most of the United States, optical fiber is what brings the Internet to our door. But the big providers like Charter/Spectrum, AT&T, and T-Mobile don’t offer Internet to rural areas because expanding out that far is too expensive—the revenue per square mile doesn’t justify it. This is a growing issue in rural America, where the “digital divide” keeps getting wider. But there are different ways to use existing or available tech to safely connect a community to the Internet, and creative people find creative answers. One of these answers can be an existing technology that is often overlooked: optical fiber, which is called “dark fiber” when it isn’t being used.