Those of us in the rural areas of Roane County and environs, except the very lucky, must make do with dial-up Internet or, if we have the funds, satellite service from Hughes or WildBlue.

In our house we chose Hughes years ago. We noticed that many less popular sites would give us DNS errors if we hadn't accessed them recently, or sometimes give a very old version of the pages instead of fresh content.

Finally this happened with a couple sites of our own.

Roane County could have a chance at truly flowering were we to get fast (1 Gb/sec) universal broadband. We aren't winning the Google broadband contest, but we could do like these folks and do it ourselves.

Electing broadband-savvy county and city officials would help. Does anyone know which candidates are the most likely to understand the need for fast broadband? These would be smart folks to support.

Update: The original speed posted was a typo; this is now corrected to 1 gigabit/second.

-- OneTahiti

Do you live in a broadband "dead zone?" If so, let the FCC know right away.

Go to www.broadband.gov, click on the "I do not have broadband at home" button, and fill out the form.

I was just writing a letter to Rep. Lincoln Davis about transportation allocations. The two choices seem to be Obama's plan to leave spending at $20,000,000,000.00 for now, or Rep. Oberstar's (D., MN) plan to up it to $500,000,000,000.00 right away.

Now I like roads, but in thinking about this issue it seemed to me that there are a lot of other infrastructure things that rural America might need improved first.

Is there a way that Roane county could "encourage" the local cable company to provide their cable modem service in rural areas? Currently if you don't live in the suburbs there is seemingly no hope.