This is why I continue to argue for community administered broadband alternatives.

It's been about ten years since I was involved directly in the inner workings of the inter-webs, but I seem to recall that a ("the"-back then) major high speed east coast trunk line zipped right down the spine of the blue ridge on its way to connecting the big cities. As I recall, infrastructure managers were discussing plans for communities to tap in to the trunk (much like how the natural gas lines slated to come through are, supposedly, able to be locally tapped). I often wonder what happened to keep that from happening.

It's even more frustrating when you look back to the innovative spirit that defined the early daze when local services like Cleveland Free Net and Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV)* were given the tools and keys to access and invent what we know the internet to be today. I wish that freedom and level of access were freely accessible to today's thinkers, dreamers, innovators, and consumers.

*For the younger ones, Blacksburg was considered the "most wired" community in the world back in 1995. BEV was truly innovative in concept and frontier spirit. BEV's online flower and grocery services (Wade's) opened up a whole new world to commerce, while BEV evolved into a community tied together and strengthened by equal access to the latest and most complete information.