Saturday, sometime between downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store and watching the 30-minute stream of the 10 p.m. news of WGEM in Quincy, Ill., I realized just how much I was going to miss college. My days of being one with the fat pipe of the college connection are coming to an end.

It’s been feast or famine for me the past four years, speeding on Ethernet at Iowa State and poking around on a 56kbps modem at home. Watch 30 straight minutes of streaming video with no buffer problems? That’s not going to happen on a modem. Getting movie trailers is troublesome enough.

While I might find a fast Internet service after I graduate, my family and thousands of others across the country are still using a method that is one Flash- or graphics-intensive Web page away from prolonged periods of frustration. With the explosion of multimedia content on the Internet, the “digital divide” between the haves and the have-nots is being further divided, splitting the haves into those who can experience the full capacity of the Internet and those who cannot. Rural areas of the United States are more prone to be in the latter category. It was only last year that more than half of rural adults had Internet access, according to a Pew Internet and American Life study released in February.

That’s why President Bush’s proposal to have universal broadband access by 2007 is an intriguing idea.

“This country needs a national goal for broadband technology, for the spread of broadband technology,” Bush said March 31. “We ought to have a universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier.”

“Universal” is a pretty strong word. It’s one thing to have broadband available to those living in a concentrated urban area. It’s quite another to make that same promise to someone at the dead end of a gravel road 10 miles from any town in Iowa that itself may have a population of less than 1,000.

The vast size of the country alone is a strong impediment. An April 1 article in the Washington Post mentioned the availability of “real broadband” in South Korea and parts of Asia, with a helping hand from government in laying fiber-optic lines. Two days earlier, ZDnet.co.uk announced a deal between the Northern Ireland Executive and BT (formerly British Telecom) offering 100 percent broadband in the area, “however rural their location.”

But South Korea could fit inside Virginia, and Northern Ireland is scarcely larger than Connecticut. It’s easier to execute such a program on that scale.

It’s also easier when the government is helping, which is not the case here. The Post article noted that “the market leaders in high-speed Internet access to homes are the entrenched cable and telephone companies.” The idea of fiber-optic lines to private homes is very new; the Post said a Verizon initiative this year is the first in the industry.

The possibility of businesses taking lines into rural areas by 2007 is very small indeed. It’s not very cost-effective. Alleviating part of the problem today are many small-town Internet businesses, offering access where it would otherwise be unavailable or more expensive. Much of that is done over existing phone lines, though.

In order to bring rural America into the broadband age, we should look to the past for a similar success with electricity. The Rural Electification Administration, created in 1936, helped provide rural areas and towns under 2,500 people with light and power by providing loans to cooperatives and other organizations. A similar program might be the solution to the broadband problem.

The idea of patterning rural broadband after rural electricity already made it to Congress once. Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., introduced a bill in 2000 that would offer loans to companies to build “broadband infrastructure” in rural areas. A March 30, 2000, Associated Press article says Dorgan modeled his bill after the Rural Electrification Act. Basin Electric Power Cooperative in North Dakota issued a press release on the subject, including more of Dorgan’s comments: “The legislation is needed, Dorgan said, because broadband build-out to rural parts of the country ‘is not going to happen on its own.'”

The sentiment is still correct four years later. Getting broadband to rural areas is going to go slowly if entirely left up to private industry. Some government assistance would be welcomed, offering incentives or loans as was done in the 1930s with electricity. Otherwise, the divide will grow deeper, and it will be a much longer time before multimedia content can flow into farmhouses without connection problems.