The problem with treating internet as a utility, is a lot of the homes in Vermont have their own water well and septic tank and don't have water, sewer as a utility.
I assume those homes have power? Power is a utility.
Fun side note: Green Mountain Power, the largest power utility in Vermont, is working with Tesla on distributed energy storage and grid management to lower power costs and for resiliency purposes (to reduce power outages in the winter due to extreme winter weather conditions). This is how a utility is supposed to work!
I've got that, a couple of subsidized Tesla Powerwalls where the deal is they get to draw up to 50% of the juice during high load times. It's a pretty reasonable deal. From the customer point of view it definitely can take the place of a generator, GMP is pretty fast about bringing power back up usually so a few PW2s is pretty good even without solar. And unlike a generator PWs don't have regular testing/maintenance/consumables/noise/pollution. On GMP's side though the big point is to offset having to buy very expensive peak load power. It's already saved them a ton of money, old press piece for example:
I'll be a little curious if usage patterns are different this summer with more people home, but it's worked out well for them under typical conditions when there are big spikes in the afternoon/evening as people get back and turn on AC or the like.
Fun side note: Green Mountain Power, the largest power utility in Vermont, is working with Tesla on distributed energy storage and grid management to lower power costs and for resiliency purposes (to reduce power outages in the winter due to extreme winter weather conditions). This is how a utility is supposed to work!