They came from across the country, invited by the Benton Foundation to extol the virtues of independent broadband at the National Press Club HQ in Washington, D.C. And a collegial bunch they were: crack developers from ISPs in Oregon, Vermont, and Minnesota, happy to talk up their achievements in building fiber and DSL networks for rural areas and small towns.

They all knew each other and seemed to be old pals, so Ars settled in for a pleasant afternoon of mutual self-congratulation. Then somebody from the audience spoke up.

"This is a question for the rural end of the table," he asked. "One of the studies that we see most frequently is one from Pew which contends that there isn't very much demand [for broadband] in rural areas, [which] is why it hasn't been built out." What did the panelists think of that?

A sore point had been raised, and suddenly the collegial smiles were gone.

"It clearly is a myth," declared Gary Evans of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, a rural ISP based in Minnesota. "We are not a low priced provider in any community that we serve, but we are a broadband provider." In one rural region, Evans noted, 60 percent of the population signed up with the company "before we put a shovel in the ground."

"Now, I would suggest to you that if there's no demand out there, that simply would not be the case," he insisted.

"Where do these Pew guys get their money?" grumbled another panelist.

Not interested?

It's unclear which Pew Internet and American Life study everybody was talking about. One of the most frequently mentioned says that about two thirds of folks who don't have broadband don't want it. They're "not interested," they told Pew, or they can't get access, or it's "difficult," or they feel that they're "too old to learn."

Another survey reported that, at the end of 2005, broadband penetration in rural America lagged behind the rest of the country by about 15 percent. A lack of access explains this phenomenon, Pew explained, noting that rural residents with high speed Internet tend to use it as much as city dwellers. But, reading the document, one could also surmise that a demand issue is also at play.

"Rural Americans are, on average, older, less educated, and with lower incomes than people living in other parts of the United States," the Pew survey observed, "all factors associated with lower levels of online use."

A recent comment sent to the Federal Communications Commission by the broadband mapping outfit Connected Nation very explicitly makes this point. "Stated simply, the business case for broadband deployment is difficult in many rural areas where computer ownership and computer use skills are low," the group's filing said.

There's no offense intended by any of these observations. But lots of rural ISP boosters are getting pretty touchy about the "broadband to nowhere" line—that people in the countryside are too spread out, illiterate, old, or just too plain out of it to demand high-speed access.

Baloney, these panelists declared. "Rural America is both hungry for broadband and anxious to use it," Evans insisted. "It's nonsense," added Tim Nulty of ECFiber, a Vermont ISP. "I don't know where they get it."

"When we started our project," Nulty continued, "the towns in question each had to have a referendum to join the project. Twenty-two towns [in total]. The worst vote we got was 78% percent in favor. Eight towns were unanimous."

Nulty is a fiber-to-the-home developer who hopes to have his network of rural subscribers completely fibered up by 2010, and will offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps. We're talking access to 900 square miles with about 55,000 people here.

"The standard traditional wisdom is 'Oh no you can't do that; impossible,'" Nulty noted. "'Can't make fiber work in rural areas. You've got to use some half-baked technology like WiFi or something like that." Au contraire, he told the audience. "It's actually significantly easier and cheaper to do fiber today than it was to do copper when our forefathers did it in the thirties."

It was definitely bragging time at the event. Hiawatha's Evans came with stats about what his Winona, Minnesota based fiber-to-the-home ISP has accomplished: 35 percent penetration by the end of its first year (1999), a host of other small towns following suit, new businesses, wired hospitals, and dramatic residential growth, "in some instances, reversing six decades of population decline." HBC hopes to tap into that 7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money to extend its reach another 900 miles, Evans says.

Neighboring Jaguar Communications brought high speeds out to a south Minnesota area of about 12,000 square rural miles, and has 10,000 customers who live in Blooming Prairie, Owatonna, Waseca, and six more townships with similar names. Its board chair, Donny Smith, described the ISP as "a group of local people who decided to do it. Nobody else would do it, so we decided to do it ourselves."

You can't download anything

These guys think that rural America's broadband penetration lag needs a lot less explaining and a lot more fixing. Rural areas may have some non-adopters, but they've also got plenty of people who want to get on the high-speed boat ASAP.

Nulty told the story of a rural Vermont repairman whose garage was packed with chainsaws, snowmobiles, and other motorized equipment. "I can't fix any of them if I can't get an exploded diagram, a shop manual, a parts list, and order parts."

"Right now I've got 14k on my dialup, when it works!" the machinist lamented. "You can't download anything at 14k. It runs for two hours and gets halfway through one page and stops!"

A half hour later, the discussion was still on a roll, with stories about rural diabetics being treated from home via video conferencing, and shots being lobbed at a Microsoft FCC filing that suggested that the government should prioritize its broadband stimulus money for wiring schools, libraries, and hospitals.

Sure, those institutions are important, Donny Smith agreed, "but the problem with focusing on just those is that they become single-purpose networks that do not serve the whole area. If [broadband] is owned by the municipal library, it's not going to have services going out to Joe Johnson's house down the street."

It's hard to argue with studies suggesting that a variety of factors are holding rural broadband back: lack of service, education, skills, and even awareness of the possibilities. But these entrepreneurs call them overblown. Their neighbors know what will happen, they say, if high speed Internet doesn't come to their neck of the woods, and soon.

Without broadband, Nulty warned, "People move out. You can't sell houses. People won't come. Kids can't do homework. This isn't about games or seeing HBO. This is about community survival."

Listing image by Eric Bangeman