Greetings! My name is Phil Farrand. Staring at a map one day, it suddenly dawned on me. "I live in the epicenter of the deadzone!" (The high-speed internet deadzone, that is.)

Six miles south, Springfieldians had several broadband options. Half a dozen miles north, Pleasant Hope had DSL. Six miles east was Fair Grove with 2.4GHz wireless hookups. And four miles to the west was Highway 13. The traffic pattern alone would guarentee some kind of high speed internet, even it is was only cellular.

But I had nothing, zip, nada, zero. And the future didn't look much better. Don't get me wrong. I love living in the rolling hills farther north of Springfield, MO. It's a beautiful area. But there aren't that many homes out here and we tend to bury them in trees and hillsides. Not a lot of incentive for the big communications companies to build high-priced infrastructure. And too much nature to make it easy to beam highspeed to us from the outer regions.

In other words, I was looking at an area somewhere around eight miles across that wasn't getting broadband anytime soon...and I lived very near the center of it. Last year, I finally got tired enough to do something about it. And thus began the adventure.