Broadband in the Sticks--Finally

Welcome, citizens of Greencastle, Indiana. Right now, most of you are using dialup connections to access the Internet, so I?ll type very slowly. But in the next couple weeks, many of you will be able to get broadband access for the first time--no thanks to the companies that should have been delivering it years ago.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development program granted a low-interest loan to Cinergy Metronet, which is installing high-speed fiber-optic cable in several rural communities in Indiana; Greencastle is just the first city on Cinergy's schedule. Many rural communities around the country have applied for funds from the agency--look here to see if your berg is on the list.

Word in Greencastle (from my mother) is that Cinergy is already signing up customers, with installations to begin in a couple weeks. Cinergy is offering several packages; a basic package of a 6Mbps Internet pipe, cable television service, and local telephone service costs $79 a month--a killer deal.

Greencastle and countless other rural communities have been relegated to the backwaters of the Internet for years because phone and cable companies haven?t deemed it profitable to offer DSL or cable Internet access, but deals such as Cinergy?s could change things. After Cinergy inked its deal, Insight Broadband moved to start offering cable Internet access. Verizon Communications has begun installing fiber in northern Indiana, where it will compete with Cinergy.

But many communications companies are still trying to prevent anyone but them from offering broadband access--even though they still don?t offer it in many sparsely populated areas. As my colleague Tom Spring reported in last October?s issue, some small communities have given up trying to get those companies to offer broadband, and instead have made efforts to offer it as a municipal utility. I'm not wild about government entities competing with private companies, but you have to hand it to these municipalities for doing what's best for their citizens. To the companies that are grousing about it, I say, you had your chance--now you can either compete, or get out of the way.

Anybody else stuck with dialup in the sticks?