In this paper, we discuss how the landscape of rural broadband (RBB) is evolving quickly, and strategic network investments being made to serve these areas and help to close the digital divide in the years ahead. Today, over tens of millions of Americans do not have reliable high-speed Internet3, and many are in these rural areas. With a foundation of virtualization and distributed access architecture (DAA) serving our coaxial footprint, Comcast is building on this to bring to life the DAA vision of a converged access infrastructure, and its introduction is timely and effective for RBB initiatives.