If we can bring wireless internet service to Macedonia, why not to Mississippi, too?

With $3.9 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the country of Macedonia now has wireless internet coverage across about 95% of its 9,600 square miles, an area about the size of Vermont or Mississippi's Delta region.

That's a lot of territory. In Macedonia, even sheep herders up in the mountains can plug into the web.

It all strikes me as ironic and rather depressing to know that a federal agency helped bankroll this kind of internet coverage in a piece of the former Yugoslavia while large portions of rural America lack even decent dialup connections, much less any form of reliable, relatively inexpensive broadband. The argument can be made that satellite connections are available. But some satellite internet subscribers have told me that these uplink/downlink services are stopgaps for them until something better comes along.

Wireless offers such an alternative, but the federal government - despite assurances to the contrary - has done little, if anything, to bring wireless or other broadband connections to farmers. There are federal programs that allegedly exist to bring broadband to folks in the country. But they mostly don't benefit Americans who grow food and fiber and live in the country or typical rural communities.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article for Progressive Farmer about broadband service in rural areas. The research put me in contact with several wireless service providers. I asked each of them - people as farflung as the Midsouth, New England and the upper Midwest - if they had taken advantage of these funding programs. None had, and they cited various reasons:

• Programs required too much in the way of community giveaways. To gain funding under certain USDA plans, wireless internet service providers (WISPs) had to donate computers and connections to local schools, libraries or governments. When you thumbed through the listing of groups receiving grants, a lot tended to be non-profit entities like Native American tribal councils that were setting up broadband on reservations.
• Paperwork was most heinous. One WISP owner estimated that it would take one person 40 to 60 hours to complete the stack of documentation needed just to apply, with no guarantee of acceptance. Most WISPs are operated by small, mom-and-pop companies, and they can barely keep up what it takes to keep their systems running. "We're not in the grant writing business," a WISP owner said. "If this were a process like applying for a loan, we could cope with it. But it's more like finding a way to make the funding look good in a press release, like it's going to help a disadvantaged group."
  
• There's an underlying suspicion that politics enters into the equation. You've got to have "the juice," one operator told me, to gain approval. Whether true or not, WISP operators have that impression. That feeling was reinforced a couple of years ago when it was announced that a chunk of "rural" broadband internet funding was going into a somewhat suburban Texas area that happened to be in the district represented by then-Congressman and power broker Tom Delay.
  

WISPs are at an economic disadvantage to begin with because they are offering service to sparcely populated areas, well past the fringe of street lights and subdivisions. As a couple of WISP owners noted, cable and regional telephone companies once dismissed the idea of offering DSL or cable broadband service in towns and smaller cities. But once WISP operators proved there was a market, these larger companies moved into those areas with wired service and skimmed the cream off the top. In many areas, all that left WISP operators were the wide open spaces where there might be one or two homes per square mile.

The beauty of wireless is that it only takes a few thousand dollars to set up service to cover, say, 50 to 75 square miles, provided the operator can site his antenna on a sufficiently tall structure - a grain elevator, radio mast and such. Speeds are at least comparable to low-end DSL service, and newer wireless technology promises to kick up speeds even more.

What rural America needs - and what Macedonia got, thanks in large part to your tax dollars - is a concerted effort, backed by a national policy aimed at bringing broadband to the rural landscape. One or two generations ago, Americans made a similar commitment to rural electrification. A lot of the thinking grew out of Franklin Roosevelt's effort to pull America out of the Depression, and policies were continued by subsequent administrations of both parties.

It took funding, subsidized lending and other incentives. But nobody connected with agriculture would argue today that it wasn't worth it.

Let me add that wireless isn't the only option. Setting up computer networks over existing electrical lines has become a practical option, as well. Eventually, connectivity through cell phone networks will fill the void in places.

Wireless, though, happens to be a more established technology that's ready right now. I'm not against funneling broadband to reservations or, for that matter, to a country like Macedonia that's trying to recover from years of war. But I know plenty of people in places like Skene, Mississippi, and Peach Orchard, Missouri, who need it now, too.