MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Fort Sumner, N.M., has a hardware store, a gas station and two grocery stores, but not much else. For Jim Koontz, owner of a cattle ranch 18 miles outside of town, it's tough to get most of the things city dwellers take for granted. But DSL? He's had that for months.

Like most people, Koontz got frustrated trying to do research online over a dial-up connection. “I didn't have the time or patience to stick with it,” he said. “It was pretty much useless to me.”

Koontz asked the folks from ENMR/Plateau Telecommunications, based in neighboring Clovis, if they could help. DSL has a prescribed distance limit of 18,000 feet, they said, and the Koontz ranch is more than 72,000 feet from the nearest central office. Months later, though, they called back.

The folks at ENMR had been in touch with West Coast equipment provider GoDigital Networks, which sells G.SHDSL pair-gain systems for extending the reach of DSL using line-powered signals and remote terminals the size of shoeboxes. The shelf unit in the CO sends 190 volts down the copper pair to power the repeaters, which clean up the signal before sending it along. With three repeaters spaced evenly along Koontz's underground copper phone line, ENMR was able to give the ranch 1.5 Mb/s of downstream bandwidth (though Koontz said at press time it was still just under 1 Mb/s).

At the time, it was the longest link GoDigital had ever achieved, but ENMR said they've since turned up an even longer circuit in Logan, N.M. — another ranch, this one 81,000 feet out. With the right gauge of cable, GoDigital claims it can go past 100,000 feet.

ENMR now expects remote locations to comprise half its customer base in the near future. “A lot of ranches sit 30 miles from town,” said ENMR's Jay Gurley. “Now a lot of them are going to be able to reach high-speed Internet.”

Because the National Exchange Carriers Association uses Universal Service Funds to compensate carriers for their expenses in delivering broadband to the boonies, ENMR recovered all of its expenses in deploying Koontz's DSL. The funding lets ENMR charge regular rates to these remote customers (ranging from $40 for 256 kb/s to $100 for 1.5 Mb/s) and still make a healthy profit. “The federal government wants broadband in rural areas, and they're willing to pay for it,” said Ellis McCasland, ENMR's wireline products manager.

Koontz is already using the Internet in new ways, like making travel arrangements, tracking cattle futures and even checking the Web site of his alma mater, Texas Tech University. When winter comes and the nights are longer, he figures he'll use it even more: “Maybe for some entertainment.”