Residents of rural communities within Crawford County are no strangers to unstable internet connections. 

Over the past 10 days, local at-home business owner, Therese Schroek, of Springboro, has had to deal with spotty internet from her internet service provider, Kinetics by Windstream.

While the issue has since been solved, it still highlights an issue that affects many residents of rural America.

"Yesterday I was here all day long, and I leave a TV on just so I can see when it goes on and off," said Schroek, who runs the Crystal Run Suites of Springboro, as well as two other remote businesses from her home along Pennsylvania Highway 18. "It went off 7 times yesterday for anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour each time."

"We live in Springboro. Cell phone service is very limited. I run three businesses here. And the three businesses that I run depend upon the Internet, and they depend upon my cell phone to be on Wi-Fi for the Internet because the cell phone service doesn't work here either. So it's very important to have all of this together. I'm not on the back roads, I'm on Route 18."

While the issue has since been solved, it still highlights an issue that affects many residents of rural America.

Crawford County Commissioner Chris Seely says it's something the Crawford County government is working to improve.

"As a part of our ARPA funding from a few years ago, the county underwent a fairly aggressive review of our broadband availability all across Crawford County," said Seely. "That included the rollout of about 150 Starlink units, [and] we've just been adding to that."

Starlink is Elon Musk's satellite internet provider, which beams signals down to areas lacking internet infrastructure, such as rural Crawford County.

"Those have been distributed across Crawford County, with a focus on the eastern portion of the county where the internet service is truly lacking," continued Seely. "By and large those units have been received well, they were county subsidized and they're moving out of that phase to where the consumers are now paying for them in full. And to my knowledge only a few just discontinued their service.”