Lack of broadband economic death sentence for small town America

Rural residents, some of whom remember living in the dark for decades while electrified city lights glowed in the distance, say they're being passed over again for services considered crucial to modern life.

Nearly all can get dial-up modem Internet service, the kind of connection that allows a user to link to the Internet for short periods of time, surf a few Web sites and check e-mail.

But dial-up connections are slow. A simple document exchanged in less than a second on a broadband connection can take hours with dial-up.

That slow pace makes running an Internet-based business from a rural area impossible, though that's exactly the type of business many people believe can help keep America's small towns from dying.