In NZ we also have the Rural Connectivity Group (RCG) which operates over 400 cellular/mobile sites in rural areas for the three mobile carriers, capital funded jointly by the NZ Government and the three mobile carriers (with operational costs shared between the three carriers I believe). For context the individual carriers operate around 2,000 of their own sites in urban areas and most towns in direct competition with each other. It has worked really well for the more rural parts of the country, filling in gaps in state highway coverage as well as providing coverage to smaller towns that would be uneconomical for the individual carriers to cover otherwise. I'm talking towns of a handful of households getting high speed 4G coverage. Really proud of NZ as this sort of thing is unheard of in most other countries.
Ironically, often you get way faster speeds out on a RCG tower too. (probably due to few users), vs when in the city, where I often get pretty average speeds be it 4g or 5g.
It depends. Some RCG towers have a single channel (sometimes small 10 MHz bandwidth or large 20 MHz bandwidth) which all carriers share which will not perform as well as some native towers where up five channels are operated using CA (Carrier Aggregation) providing up to 100 MHz of total bandwidth. You'll see most of these in smaller towns. However I've seen RCG towers operate with multiple channels across which they load balance all customers (regardless of their native carrier) which are indeed pretty good (but AFAIK, RCG doesn't do CA but I could be wrong on that front). Those higher capacity towns are often in areas like beach towns where they expect lots of traffic during weekends and holidays.
