It's not unusual for rural areas to have a single path to the Internet. Port Townsend is within 35 miles of Seattle, but on the wrong side of the Sound. Up until a couple of years ago it's only data path was along a single overhead cable going north along Highway 101 from Olympia.
Last summer I spent a week in Chama, NM. It's at the end of a single internet feed that comes north from Santa Fe 160 miles away. When the link develops problems, which happens fairly frequently, all of the providers including the local landline suffer to the point where local restaurants stop accepting credit cards because their POS card readers couldn't connect. The RV Park where I was staying also owned the Chevron station out front. The owner said they routinely accept thousands of dollars worth of transactions during each outage without being able to verify the validity of the cards, otherwise they might as well shut down.
I can tell you more stories than you'd care to hear about the difficulties of maintaining not only internet, but plain old copper wire connectivity and/or even reliable electrical power at multiple transmitter sites in urban/suburban Southern California.
It doesn't take a hacker to bring down our power or communications, the infrastructure has been neglected for so long it's collapsing on it's own.
