Broadband Crawling Its Way To Exurbs

So her husband has to use dial-up.

"My husband is just screaming his brains out because it's so slow," she said. "It's killing us. It's absolutely killing us."

Katie Stickel, 44, said she can't get DSL or cable-modem service to her 500-acre wheat-and-corn farm in Nanjemoy, a sleepy peninsula in Charles. So when her 16-year-old daughter had to do research for an English paper this month, Stickel said, she had to drag her daughter to her broadband-equipped office in White Plains.

"It's a big problem for students if you live in a rural area," she said. "You have no access to an electronic infrastructure.

Harry Mitchell, a spokesman for Verizon, said the company is aware of the fierce demand for broadband and is trying to expand its reach to all parts of the country. But he said it is sometimes too expensive to provide service to residents who often live miles away from anyone else.

"You've got to have a business model where you have a chance of making some money," he said.

In other states, telephone and cable companies have raised concerns that publicly owned utilities and local governments supplying broadband over power lines have an unfair advantage over private companies. In response, they have supported legislation that restricts what those utilities and municipalities can do.

Nebraska is considering a measure that would prevent public power utilities from selling broadband provided over power lines. More than a dozen states have passed some type of legislation limiting what governments can do to offer broadband access, according to MuniWireless.com, an online newsletter that tracks community-based wireless projects.

"Our belief is that the private sector is best positioned to build these networks," Mitchell said.

But even in such places as Loudoun, home to some of the vast computer warehouses that direct the nation's Internet traffic, private companies have yet to provide large parts of the county -- especially rural areas -- with broadband access.

So officials, concerned that the Loudoun is being left behind, hired Scott W. Bashore, a former technology executive from Loudoun-based America Online Inc., to be the county's first manager of broadband services. Since he started six weeks ago, Bashore has been working with telephone, cable and wireless providers to map out which parts of the county have access now and where the biggest problem areas are.

Although fiber-optic cables already pulse underground in the suburban east, Loudoun's 300-square-mile rural area offers added hurdles and opportunities. Wireless technologies may allow Internet service providers to cover wide distances more efficiently and cheaply, but there are limits.

"If somebody's down in a valley, and they are surrounded by 60-year-old oak trees in full bloom, you're going to have a hard time getting a signal in there," Bashore said.

That's partly why Steve E. Collier, vice president of emerging technologies at the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, said subsidies from the federal government probably will be needed to ensure that high-speed Internet access extends to the most far-flung parts of the country.

"There are certain things in this country that we believe people have a right to have no matter where they are: clean drinking water, paved roads, basic phone service, basic electric service," he said. "I think ultimately, broadband Internet is going to be one of those things."

Staff writer Michael Laris also contributed to this story.