Along with thousands of other Maine residents, I’ve come up with another $10

a month to switch from dial-up Internet service to broadband and am now able to receive junk e-mail and annoying telephone solicitations simultaneously. But that wasn’t my entire reason for switching. Call it a middle-age desire for speed.

Speed to download files, open Web pages, stream video. Speed is relative, however, and it turns out that if the old dial-up service is the equivalent of a Ford Pinto, my Verizon service upgrades me only about as far as an Escort while other parts of the world have discovered the joyful whoosh of, say, a BMW.

Maine’s Internet pokiness is the nation’s pokiness, according to an article this spring in Foreign Affairs by Thomas Bleha, who laments that since 2001 the United States has fallen from fourth to 13th place worldwide for broadband usage. And not only do comparatively few of us have broadband, the wires we use are many times slower and cost users much more than service in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. “By dislodging the United States from the lead it commanded not so long ago,” Bleha writes, “Japan and its neighbors have positioned themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation and

an improved quality of life.”

They may be the first, but through a coincidence of timing, Maine has the remarkable chance over the next several months to begin catching up, especially in some of its rural regions. No one grasps this better than Pat Scully, head of Gov. Baldacci’s new Broadband Access Infrastructure Board, who observes that more and more people need to communicate over the Internet in a real-time basis, but “if we want people in rural parts of the state to participate in this economy, they can’t do it without high-speed Internet access.” High-speed in Maine for those who can get it means from less than 1 to about 3 megabits per second; in Japan, according to Bleha, widely available 26 megabits per second costs the equivalent of $22 per month.

Scully’s day job is as an attorney for Bernstein Shur in Portland, where among his clients are about 50 towns with Adelphia cable contracts. Those contracts include a provision that allows the towns to approve or reject the sale of Adelphia, making Time-Warner, which is buying the bankrupt cable company, especially open to suggestions for improved access. While Mr. Scully stresses that there are no bad guys in this negotiation and that Time-Warner has made investments in Maine before, these towns are looking for improved service and what some of them perceptively want is expanded broadband coverage.

The general rule for coverage is that it extends as far as areas with 18 houses per mile. But Maine has plenty of places, often places with low economic growth, with housing density below that. Persuading Internet providers to serve these areas could make a huge difference to the level of coverage here generally; not making that investment puts Maine back behind the wheel of the Pinto. As Public Utilities Commission Chairman Kurt Adams said of those contracts the other day, “Maine can’t afford to be a laggard state in

a laggard nation.”

The PUC itself has a similar situation before it with the proposed merger of Verizon and MCI. Yesterday, at a PUC hearing on the issue, the commission wanted to know what sort of investments the company planned to make in its broadband infrastructure in Maine. Verizon spokesman Peter Reilly told me the company was willing to invest as the market warranted and as was economically feasible. The commission would be serving Maine to ask for a better answer than that.

If the governor’s broadband group is successful, it will by year’s end have a handle on the regulatory, financial and technological challenges for the current broadband system in the state and have devised ways to improve it. The Internet remains magically mysterious to some of us who didn’t grow up with it; the ways of encouraging its growth are dull but necessary – tax incentives, subsidies for some areas, increased competition, which, fortuitously, was bundled in a court decision last month allowing Skowhegan Online to the use a portion of Verizon’s copper wire to bring broadband to neighboring communities. That decision supports competition not just in the Skowhegan area but statewide.

A cable contract, a phone-service merger, a new broadband group, a court ruling in favor of competition and a state that must have improved high-speed Internet connections. During the dot-com ’90s, you would have called that synergy. Whoosh.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.