Tom, you always put the rosiest spin possible on the operation of the free market, and turn a blind eye to its negatives.

Living up in the Santa Cruz mountains for years, I encountered exactly the same situation that RNE did. A GTE rep told me flat out that it would be cold day in hell before I ever got DSL because it's not economical. That's perfectly in accord with free-market dogma. What we saw after telecom deregulation was companies flocking into high-density urban areas to provision modern service because their cost-per-subscriber was the lowest in those areas. The economics are very different in low-density rural areas, and the laughing ISP guy was telling the sober truth.

This is not exactly news. Many years ago every state's PUC mandated that phone companies had to provide analog service to people in the country at the same rate as in the cities because otherwise the phone companies wouldn't do it, for the aforementioned reasons of economics. That was a smart policy on many levels, not only for fluffy reasons of "social" policy but for hard-headed reasons of encouraging business and commerce in outlying areas. Where would be today if rural areas had been denied analog phone service? Where will be in the future if rural areas are denied modern digital service? Heck, I could even make a case that for reasons of national security we need to encourage the population to disperse to the countryside to reduce the attractiveness of dense urban targets to terrorists.

I wouldn't look to wireless as a magic panacea. Terrestrial wireless requires construction of transceiver towers within a certain distance of subscribers, and essentially the same economics apply. Worse, mountainous rural areas are even more expensive because of the need to site the towers atop inaccessible peaks to "see" down into canyons and valleys with only a few subscribers. I seriously doubt that wireless will have any economic advantage at all over wires in many, if not most, situations. Have you noticed that the availability of wireless today exactly parallels the availability of wired service?

Satellite's the most promising possibility, but it has inherent problems too. Until we come up with FTL communications, the latency of the roundtrip to geosync orbit introduces unacceptable delays into digital transmissions. Digital protocols require handshaking to make sure that every packet arrives, so no matter how fast the bit rate, the delay in getting the handshake confirmation will still slow the effective transmission rate to a crawl.

The latency problem could be improved a bit by changing the protocols to use larger packet sizes to reduce the handshaking overhead (the Internet's TCP/IP protocol uses tiny packets of 1520 bytes each), but then you run into the practical economic problem of getting the world to pay the enormous cost of retrofitting millions of existing devices.

All of which is to point out that communication services, more than most products, are constrained by the laws of physics which in turn translate into hard economic realities. Economic dogma and wishful thinking have little power to change that, as companies like WorldCom discovered to their sorrow. Without regulatory intervention to force the issue, people in low-density rural areas will never have the same level of communications infrastructure as people in cities enjoy. It's The Law.

I was going to ask you if you really wanted to bet a week's salary on this, but then I noticed how craftily you worded the offer. Yeah, there might be options in rural areas in five years (technically there are options now), but will they be economical and perform acceptably? I doubt that. Besides, aren't you self-employed? What's this salary bit, then? You sly dog, if you'd been there to help the Bushies craft their claims about Iraqi WMD, they wouldn't be in such hot water today.