IBM has announced it has begun to establish a new network that will bring broadband Internet service to nearly 200,000 rural customers served by 7 rural electric cooperatives in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia. IBM is promoting a technology that allows broadband to be moved over electric power lines. The company says the technology will allow customers to buy (or rent) a modem that plugs into existing electrical outlets. You can see if your coop is in on the IBM experiment here.

"Technology to send broadband over power lines has been around for several years, but it typically hasn’t been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone companies," Saul Hansell reports in the New York Times. "But with government subsidies, the approach is starting to be deployed in areas that don’t have access to other forms of broadband." In fact, this effort has been subsidized by low-interest loans from the Rural Development Program at USDA, which will administer a good portion of the broadband money in the stimulus bill.

The system is cost effective with as few as five people living along each mile of electric line. The system is fairly slow and expensive, $30 a month for 256 kilobits per second; $50 a month for 1 megabit per second. The Midwest Energy Cooperative in Michigan did a survey of its customers for the service. Within a week, 4,000 homes were on the waiting list.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (above), acknowledging the USDA’s Rural Utility Service hasn’t done “it right” with extending broadband to the nation’s countryside, says that under a new Administration the ag department agency is best suited for meeting a major goal of the federal stimulus package. In the stimulus bill completed late last week, $4 billion for broadband will be routed through the Commerce Department and $2.5 billion will go to USDA. “Commerce might be able to do some of that in the cities but not in rural America,” Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee said on a conference call with the Daily Yonder and other media.

Harkin said the USDA simply understands rural America better. “The RUS has been doing this kind of thing for 50, 60, 70 years, back to the 1940s,” Harkin said. “They’ve been involved in loans and loan guarantees and things like that since 1949 so they know how to do these things.” Harkin acknowledged that programs in the 2002 farm bill designed to get broadband out to more places in rural America didn’t work as well as planned. “Quite frankly the RUS didn’t do it right,” Harkin said. “I will say that. We had a person in charge that my staff always called ‘Mr. No.’ ‘Mr. No.,’ that’s not his real name, but he always said ‘no’ to putting money into broadband to communities that really needed it.”

One major problem, Harkin said, is that RUS focused on communities that already had broadband. This week, The Washington Post published a story in which critics of the RUS questioned whether it the best vehicle to speed wire small towns and farms, many of which are frustrated with obsolete slow service. In response to a line of questioning on the conference call, Harkin said the new farm bill streamlines the RUS process and makes other corrections. Harkin also said that U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, understands broadband’s importance in his state — and won’t let any Mr. Nos get in the way of progress.

Douglas Burns

The Senate/House conference committee report on the stimulus bill splits broadband funding between Commerce and Agriculture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2007 asked every farm operator in the country if he or she had a broadband Internet connection. Here are the results for the West.