"You see that hill over there beyond the tree line? That's Canada."

Pointing northwest, Steve Mason leads me and Cory Heigl, his boss at Packerland Communications, a local internet provider in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, into a fenced-off shack. The simple wooden structure, smaller than a one-car garage, holds a few server blades connected to a 200-foot cell tower outside. It doesn't look like much, but this shack could hold the key to providing the internet to people who've never had access before, those cut off from the modern era by geography and economics.

Packerland's tower is about 10 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, a town split by the St. Mary's River, which separates the US from Canada. In town, you'll likely get a few bars of cell connection. Most buildings have WiFi that can probably load this website. But head a few miles outside of town, and cell and internet service drops to nil. The big providers—Verizon, AT&T, Spectrum—know that when population drops below a certain threshold, it's not financially viable for them to build out the infrastructure to service the people who live there.

But it's not as if no one lives here. Outside of town, large farms divide the land, cows graze the cold grass, and pickup trucks dart from pastures to houses on the frigid October day I was in town. Sault Ste. Marie's population is around 13,600, but the towns just south of it, Bruce Township and Dafter, have respective populations of just 9,236 and 1,250.

In a community center on an otherwise empty road, a local news crew, Packerland employees, a few local businesspeople and their congressman, representative Jack Bergman, and myself convened to drink coffee and discuss what could be a breakthrough in connecting remote areas to the internet.

Quartz/Mike Murphy

Packerland's tower, outside of Sault Ste. Marie.

Heigl, the general manager of Packerland's broadband division, thanked everyone for attending, and ceded the floor to Mason, the company's wireless solutions director. He held up an antenna that looked like something you'd have found on the roof of any house that has TV. And it was—Mason and his team had been working on using radio frequencies allocated to the broadcast industry by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that aren't currently in use to deliver internet to people. The concept, using what are called TV whitespaces, is not new—the FCC has been testing it for a few years, and adopted rules to allow companies to use the frequencies in 2010—but few have moved from the theoretical to the realistic.

Packerland has been working with Microsoft to develop its technology as part of the software giant's Airband Initiative, where it's using its size and connections to help bring broadband-like internet connectivity to 2 million people in rural America by 2022. Mason demonstrated how his company had developed the whitespace concept into a working product, with Microsoft's help, connecting his team to companies like Redline, which developed the radio technologies Packerland has been testing.

Giant antennas had been replaced with small plastic boxes. The company's tower was just down the way from the community center, and Mason had hooked up an antenna outside the building to show what the connection speeds were like. Even in heavy snow, he was still getting about 43 Mbps download speed, which is not far off from what I often get in my very connected Brooklyn apartment. Mason said the range of the current setup is about 6 miles.

The team's radio tower is around 200 ft tall. But the whitespace radios are only about 100 ft up the tower due to current FCC regulations that forbid them from being placed any higher so as to not interfere with broadcast signals (even though there are no broadcasters in the area). Mason said the radio's range could be extended if it were raised higher, and has petitioned Bergman to work with Congress to change the regulations.

Quartz/Mike Murphy

Packerland's Steve Mason showing off one of the antennas used in the company's tests.

The company brought me, along with the congressman and the others, to a house a few miles south of the community building. It looked like a standard, two-story suburban home, with a porch, space for multiple cars out front, and cute stonework adorning the windows. It belongs to Jason and Amy TenEyck, who have lived in the house for 18 years, along with their two kids.