dirtroad.com

Until recently — Tuesday, actually — Mainers hurt by the loss of shoe, apparel and woods jobs could take some comfort in the soothing words of their political leaders that the galloping decline of traditional industries would soon be overtaken by new-economy digital commerce roaring along the information superhighway. If nothing else, they were told, Maine was in the front row of the Internet race, wired up, on-line and ready to roll.

Tuesday was when a strange and disturbing sputtering was heard from under the hood. That’s when iAdvance, a new bipartisan coalition of members of Congress, public-interest groups and telecommunications, computer and technology companies, released its list of the “Disconnected Dozen,” the 12 states most hindered by federal regulations that slow deployment of high-speed Internet connections. Maine, big surprise, is among that number.

The problem is backbone hubs, the broadband high-speed on-ramps to the Internet. Nationally, there aren’t nearly enough of them; in rural states there are hardly any. Maine is one of five states with none. Federal laws, regulations and policies restricting data transmission also restricts comnpetition and discourages private-sector investment in backbone hubs everywhere but in the most densely populated cities.

Businesses in places such as Silicon Valley, New York and Los Angeles can zoom onto the Internet through these advanced networks that allow real-time communications, lightning fast buying and selling, dramatic reductions in inventory and support-service costs. People can zoom to the latest in tele-medicine and tele-education. Those places without backbone hubs, especially the Disconnected Dozen, putt along on what iAdvance calls “the digital equivalent of dirt roads.”

There are now roughly 1,000 backbone hubs in the United States, heavily concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Atlanta gobble up more than 160 of them. iAdvance estimates that common-sense changes in federal regs regarding data transfer across local telecommunications boundaries (called LATAs, or Local Access and Transport Areas) would more than double the number of hubs and lead to the creation of as many as 29 in Maine. The economic result would be an increase in GDP (gross domestic product) of some $700 billion by 2005 and the addition of as many as 5.5 million jobs.

And not just in the big city. Those regulatory changes would make it feasible for a small internet service provider (ISP) to connect its customers to the broadband network. Because their use is severely restricted by the geography of telecommunications regulations, backbone hubs are very expensive to build and to staff — about $200,000 each. They are also very expensive to access outside of the LATA — typically from $25,000 to $40,000 per month, obviously beyond the reach of a small, rural ISP with only a few hundred customers. With the changes recommended by iAdvance, and about to be put into the form of legislation by lawmakers from two other “Disadvantaged Dozen” states, the cost of creating a hub would plummet, as would the cost of connecting to one.

The dearth of backbone hubs is the result of years of Congressional tinkering that has placed the nation’s telecommunications system in a no-man’s land between deregulation and over-regulation. The surprise Mainers must feel at finding themselves on a dirt road when they thought they were in the passing lane is the result of comforting talk by state leaders who apparently don’t know what they’re talking about.