If you send one terabit of data over the Internet, you’ve sent the equivalent of just more than 1,000 gigabits, each of which in turn is about 1,000 megabits, which itself is about 100 times the capacity of the connection to your home computer if you have good cable service and 1,000 times Verizon’s basic DSL service. For those with dial-up service – how does that work, again?

Terabits matter in Maine because that’s the scale local companies such as James W. Sewall in Old Town, a surveying and mapping company, and The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor are thinking about when they move data. Or try to – the wires they have available are too small or too expensive to do this efficiently and, as they look at their competitors operating elsewhere with easier access to bigger pipes, they wonder whether they should join them.

So what if a couple of companies can’t get adequate Internet access or don’t like the cost? So they are the harbingers of where the economy is headed. If they are having trouble in 2006, many more companies will have trouble in 2010, and no company of the sort Maine wants to attract will move to an Internet backwater.

Maine had a fine assessment of its broadband capabilities completed in 2001, in a report called “The Next Steps Toward the Last Mile” – the last mile being from a major line to a business or home. But as good as the report was, it might now be dated.

One of its recommendations was to “let the private sector take the lead,” referring to investments by Verizon and Adelphia, and included the observation, “To date, there have been no documented projects where lack of broadband has stopped a current or new business from coming to Maine.”

That was five years ago, now Jonathan Daniels, president of the Eastern Maine Development Corp., says, “Not only are we having businesses leave the state because of this, look how difficult it will be to engage in business attraction.” And Steven Lambert of Sewall adds, “If you’re waiting for the economies of scale to force multinationals to build infrastructure, it will never happen.”

They and others in this region are worried enough to have formed a group to become more effective in solving the problem, a move Kurt Adams, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, welcomes because, he says, consumers have been harmfully absent from commission decisions on broadband. “We’re trying to guess what consumers want,” he says. “Sometimes we get it right and I’m sure sometimes we don’t get it right.”

Getting it right means getting a move on. And the intriguing part is that Maine really could, for at least two reasons. The first is its fortuitously – for once – dispersed schools, and the related second reason arrives through the generosity of Nynex, later Verizon (and, next, who knows), which has a lot of unused fiber cable distributed statewide.

The company has made a large investment here, initially as part of a punishment from the Public Utilities Commission, which in the mid-1990s found Nynex had earned more than was allowed from customers. The settlement included the creation of the Maine School and Library Network, a $21 million project to link to the Internet at cost every K-12 public school and library in the state. At the time, a national first.

Just this month, the last of the schools originally connected at slow dial-up speeds will have been upgraded to broadband, some with DSL, some with larger lines. But what if, Adams wonders, the next phase of this valuable program provided every school and library with a fiber connection, a hundredfold increase in capacity? That would be good for learning and very good for business – it would mean that all 950 of these sites, many in rural areas, had a nearby fiber connection, and that’s an opportunity for their neighbors.

Sens. Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller created a School and Library Network on the federal level, called E-Rate, that funds high-speed Internet connections to schools nationwide. A combination of federal funding and a share from the state could accelerate this progression to faster service, improving Maine’s business prospects.

Verizon’s unused high-speed lines – called “dark fiber,” making it sound like pumpernickel bread – are the second opportunity. The company is said to have an extensive network that could serve many more companies in Maine. Verizon, however, obscures exactly where and how much of a network exists, so much so that the PUC last spring concluded, “Verizon’s inventory practices may have anti-competitive impacts on the market in Maine.”

Nevertheless, Verizon has been responsive before to the concerns of Maine businesses and it could continue to be, especially if a message from state and federal lawmakers and business owners was clear about what the region needed.

The message could start with a statistic. As a Commerce Department survey found in 2002 and a Government Accountability Office confirmed in May, urban Internet users are about 75 percent more likely to have high-speed connections compared with rural users. This is self-perpetuating – the demand for high-speed service makes it more easily avail-able and less expensive, attracting more businesses that depend on it.

That’s a trap Maine must escape if it wants some of those businesses to locate here. Or its current businesses to remain. Either way, the last thing Maine should want is for its current Internet capacity to eventually become enough.

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