A Clinton Download

President Clinton pressed ahead Wednesday with his efforts to expand the Internet’s reach, as the government released a survey showing small-town America is lagging behind urban centers in gaining access to high-speed digital communications.

The president, on his fifth trip to draw attention to the “digital divide,” this time landed in the southeastern corner of North Carolina--continuing a tour that has taken him to such disparate sites as an Indian reservation in New Mexico and East Palo Alto, Calif. At each stop, Clinton has touted the need to help down-and-out communities catch up with more prosperous, thoroughly wired ones.

Part preacher, part salesman, the president told a gathering of Whiteville residents: “No. 1, we believe that in rural North Carolina, in rural America, Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access. And, No. 2, you ought to be able to use it in the fastest possible way. And, No. 3, if you can, it’ll mean more jobs, more businesses, higher incomes and more opportunities.”

Clinton stopped Wednesday at an environmental monitoring technology company, Remote Data Systems, where he witnessed a demonstration of broad-band, or high-speed, Internet operations. The company uses the Internet to sell its products as far away as Australia.

At the heart of Clinton’s message is the idea that high-speed access to the Web is perhaps as crucial to the commercial development of small-town America as telephone and railroad service once were.

Standing in front of a shuttered railroad depot, Clinton said that no matter how many roads were built or electricity lines strung, “we never quite caught up in rural America, did we?”

The Internet, he said, can change all that.

“What does the Internet do that the railroads didn’t do, that the highways didn’t do, that a rural airport didn’t do, that electricity didn’t do?” he asked. “It collapses time and distance.”

As Clinton was making his pitch, the White House made public a report by the Commerce and Agriculture departments on the lack of access in small towns and their outlying communities to high-speed Internet connections.

The report found that cable modems and digital subscriber lines, or DSL, “are being deployed at a high rate” but largely in urban areas. Only 5% of towns with populations of 10,000 or fewer have cable modem service, the report says. DSL options are similarly lacking.

The gap, according to the report, is caused by factors both economic (the cost of erecting wires to carry digital signals to individual homes) and technological (the difficulty of sending signals increases as the distance between the central stations and homes grows).

But on an encouraging note, the report says that service in rural areas is likely to be provided “through new technologies, which are still in the early stages of deployment or . . . testing.”

“Satellite broad-band service has particular potential for rural areas, as the geographic location of the customer has virtually no effect on the cost of providing service,” the report says.

Just how wide the digital divide actually is and where it exists remain open questions. Some Internet experts are skeptical about the need for a dramatic effort to close it.

They say that the gap--documented in the mid-1990s by the federal National Telecommunications and Information Administration--largely has disappeared, at least as measured among specific demographic groups of Americans.

Indeed, a study last year by the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm Forrester Research found that Latinos, blacks and Asian Americans were signing up for Internet access at a higher rate than whites.