Escape From Silicon Valley – Broadband is inspiring refugees from tech’s meccas to build businesses where the living is easy and startup costs are low.

You’d think it would be every nerdy country boy’s dream. Kord Campbell, a 38-year-old coder from Oklahoma, started a search engine company called Grub back in the day and sold it in early 2003 to a San Francisco-based dotcom called LookSmart for $1.3 million. Suddenly he had money, and he was moving to the very cradle of geekness, the holy shrine of tech, Silicon Valley. "It was like going to the mothership," Campbell says. "You could run into someone in the grocery store and discuss how to install Linux on a PC."

Much of broadband’s spread comes from telecoms picking up the postbust pieces and building out networks to midsize and smaller cities — places like Bend, Ore., Overland Park, Kan., and Albuquerque, N.M. In dozens of smaller rural towns, local governments are setting up municipal broadband networks, recalling the bygone days when many little towns built their own power utilities.

By Om Malik

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