Until recently, if you happened to have a medical emergency while driving through Townshend, Vermont, a hamlet of just more than 1,000 people in the southern, rural area of the state, it would do no good to pull out your iPhone. You would have no signal. "The irony was not lost on us that someone next door to the hospital couldn't dial 911 on their cell phone," says Roger Allbee, CEO of the local hospital, Grace Cottage.

It’s the kind of problem that Vanu Bose, the founder of the small cell network provider CoverageCo, has been trying to solve with a new, ultra-energy-efficient mobile technology. Bose chose two places to pilot this tech: Vermont and Rwanda. “We picked these two locations because we knew they would be challenging in terrain and population density,” he says. “What we didn’t expect was that many of the problems were the same in Rwanda and Vermont—and in fact the rollout has been much easier in Africa.”

Matt Dunne is a Vermont businessman focused on rural economic development. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

I live with my family on the small farmstead where I was raised in rural Vermont. I went off to college and then returned. I got elected at 22 to the state legislature, helped grow a local software company that served commercial printers worldwide, and spent nearly a decade working for Google from an old bread factory building in White River Junction, just 10 minutes’ drive from where we raise sheep, chickens, and blueberries. Lately, we’ve been restoring 200-year-old barns to house our livestock and tractor. We never miss the Tunbridge World’s Fair, where five-year-olds expertly handle cattle and grandmothers hope their jams and jellies will win blue ribbons. My kids know how to move sheep from one pasture to another and bottle feed baby lambs, and my 12-year-old is already better with the bucket loader than I am.

I’m proof that a rural lifestyle doesn't have to have to exist in opposition to the tech boom that is reshaping vast regions of our country. But for people in rural areas to benefit from the opportunities of the tech revolution, places like Vermont need to be better connected.

For most of my career, I’ve focused on rural economic development. The issues of basic infrastructure—the things many take for granted, such as internet service, public transportation of any kind, and cell phone coverage—have always been a challenge in small-town America, where there are fewer people, those people are more spread out, and there’s a lot less money.

Historically, public-private partnerships have been critical to ensuring economic success in rural areas. In the late 19th century, the government piloted a program called Rural Free Delivery, which delivered mail to farmers and others who lived outside cities. Before RFD, people had to travel a day or longer to pick up their mail, or pay a private service to deliver it. The Rural Electrification Act, which provided federal loans to companies to power rural areas, and the Eisenhower Interstate System, which financed early construction of the highways, were similarly critical to providing connectivity that allowed economic vitality across a vast majority of the land mass of the country. The broadband initiatives of the Obama Administration, although relatively smaller in scale, hoped to achieve the same result.

Here’s where I tell you clearly that I’m an advisor to CoverageCo. The company hired me in January as a consultant to address some of the challenges it was facing as it tried to figure out a business model and deployment strategy in Vermont. I had left Google and loved the technology challenge. Even more important, I wanted to help make sure the kind of communication tools that most people take for granted and that all employers expect of their employees will finally become a reality in Vermont, and other hard-to-reach rural areas.

CoverageCo has designed a small device that can be mounted on any utility pole or building to deliver service to a phone, for any carrier that participates. So, carriers don’t need to build expensive and massive cell towers for you to make a call. The company has received federal and state funding to support the capital costs of deploying this network, but it ran into unexpected challenges. For one, the company needed to install a new meter for each device, and that meter costs many times the cost of the electricity used to power it. The company also discovered that the DSL backhaul, the available broadband that allows the cell service to connect, is constantly interrupted, causing the radios to reboot and drop calls. And then there’s the challenge of providing the 911 service itself: The cost for the vendor that provides the emergency connections is fixed, regardless of whether that connection serves 1,000 people living on a Manhattan block or the two people that may connect to it on a Townshend country road.