Taking Broadband Internet Access to the Last ‘Last Mile’: To Rural America

When tech people talk about providing residential users with new phone and Internet services, they talk about the challenges of wiring that "last mile" separating your home from the main network. But beyond those last miles now being wired in cities and suburbs, there are still miles and miles of rural America to go. I know. I live there.

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

The geography of Internet service in the land of the last "last miles" could not be stranger or more discontinuous. I have a friend who lives in the back of beyond in Wyoming — 20 miles outside a town of 400 people that is, itself, the definition of nowhere. But at the end of his road there’s a phone hub — a fiber-optic intersection — that gives him broadband access, and the feeling of living on the very first mile. He might as well be in downtown Denver.

I live three hours north of New York City and 30 miles from Albany. I am surrounded by small towns with high-speed service. A couple of years ago, a crew ran fiber-optic cable tantalizingly close — right up the highway that runs past my door. Another crew ran fiber-optic cable down the Thruway, which is only that one last mile away. It seems I live a few thousand feet too far from everything.

I’m the one living in the real back of beyond: the land of dial-up Internet access.

Most weeks, I spend a couple of days working half a block from Times Square. In my office I have what nearly every office worker has these days: a fast broadband connection to the Internet, always on, always humming. I remember vividly the first time I used a connection that fast. It was like hearing the news being read aloud by a good tobacco auctioneer.

Most of us soon catch up to broadband speed, and we lose the twitchy sensation of that first primal hookup. The auctioneer seems to have slowed down, but we’re just listening faster. Every week when I go into work, I still re-experience the historic luxury of the synaptic flash of that broadband link. When I head home to the country, the pace of online life slows down.

Satellite works fine for television here, but so far it’s a balky link for Internet access. I watch the Rural Broadband Coalition Web site for news of developments that may someday connect us to the high-speed grid. In Washington State, there are plans to bring wireless connections to rural customers. Elsewhere, high-speed connections are being offered through electric wall sockets.

Some days, when our link to the outer world seems unusually crippled, I think of the long-range wireless experiments going on in Sydney, Australia, or Boeing’s plan to expand its satellite broadband service to all the ships at sea. I begin to wish that someone would experiment on me.

But this is more than a matter of inconvenience. These days, when the Internet teems with complex Web sites and oversized files for downloading, broadband is no longer a luxury: it’s a necessity. The need to get high-speed access to rural areas is analogous to the rural electrification project that began to transform America in the late 1930’s. One of the most critical issues facing this country is the increasing economic and cultural isolation of rural communities — the abandonment and the ultimate re-democratization of the landscape. No business would settle in a town that lacked electricity, and we are now at the point where no business will settle in a town that lacks broadband access.

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture created a $1.4 billion loan program to help underwrite rural broadband expansion. So far only about $30 million has been awarded, perhaps because, as some critics claim, the program is too restrictive.

It’s unlikely that established telecommunications giants will be the ones to bring broadband to the open country. It is going to take the initiative and inventiveness of local communities, partnering with government and small tech companies, to get the job done.

My hope is that the wait will be worth it, as it often is with technology. Latecomers have a way of leapfrogging over early adopters. Rural America could end up with higher connection speeds than most urban and suburban residential customers now enjoy.

Broadband access is no panacea for isolation, not in rural counties where the bus routes have been abandoned and the hospitals have fled, and the towns have shrunk below a sustainable core of residents. But broadband offers a vital two-way pipeline to the outer world. It can provide a beginning for the technological foundation needed to resettle rural America, which desperately needs resettling. Talk to those farmers who were there when the lights first went on in the house and the barn back in the 1930’s, and you’ll have some idea of just what rural broadband might mean.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company