Stimulus funds wire rural homes to web

In rural northern Vermont, it took until the 1960s to run power lines to some towns - decades after the rest of America.

These days, it's the digital revolution that remains but a rumor in much of rural America.

Dial-up user Val Houde knows this as well as anybody. After moving to East Burke, Vt., four years ago, the 51-year-old mother of four took a correspondence course for medical transcription, hoping to work from home. She plunked down $800, took the course, then found out the software wasn't compatible with dial-up internet, the only kind available to her.

Selling items on eBay, watching videos, playing games online? Forget it. The connection from her home computer is so slow, her online life is one of delays, degraded quality and "buffering" warning messages. So she waits until the day a provider extends broadband to her house.

"I feel like these companies, they don't care about these little pockets of places," she said one night recently, showing a visitor her computer's slow internet service. "And I know we're not the only ones."

For Houde and millions of other Americans laboring under slow or no internet service, help is on the way.

Bolstered by billions in federal stimulus money, an effort to expand broadband internet access to rural areas is under way, an ambitious 21st-century infrastructure project with parallels to the New Deal electrification of the nation's hinterlands in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the Depression, it was power to the people - for farm equipment and living-room lamps, cow-milking machines and kitchen appliances. Now, it's online access - to YouTube and digital downloads, to videoconferencing and Facebook, to eBay and Twitter.

"Rural areas all across the country are wrestling with this, somewhat desperately," said Paul Costello, executive director of the Vermont Council on Rural Development. "Young people who grow up with the media will not live where they can't be connected to digital culture. So most rural communities have been behind the eight ball."

Seventy years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized that if private industry wouldn't run power lines out to the farthest reaches of rural areas, it would take government money to help make it happen. In 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was established to deliver electricity to the Tennessee Valley and beyond.

Now, money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is doing the same with broadband, which is typically defined as DSL (digital subscriber line), cable modem, fiber optic or fixed wireless.

The stimulus act set aside $7.2 billion for expansion of broadband access, believing it will spur economic growth, boost educational opportunities and create jobs. The money has jump-started what were existing efforts by states and telecom providers to bridge the digital divide of rural America.