alt Hacker Newsand yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.
The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.