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The Kutztown Project

Kutztown, Pa., is a couple miles from where my mom and her busband live. It’s a fairly quiet small-college town, just far enough from the Interstate to avoid an enormous big-box retailer. What Kutztown does have, however, is high-speed data lines. For everybody in town.

In 2001, Kutztown decided to build its own network, hiring a Harrisburg-area tech firm to lay a fiber-optic ring around the town. Town officials gave the network a name, Hometown Utilicom, and by summer of 2002, the borough-owned utility was offering cheap, high-speed Internet access to any home or businesses within town limits. Today, the town has 791 subscribers, and 100 are college students.

Many of Kutztown University’s upperclassmen live not in campus dorms, but downtown, above the bars and shops. With 9,000 undergraduates, Hometown Utilicom is poised to cash in on the students who don’t live on campus and don’t feel like waiting to use computer labs.

Unfortunately, my mom can’t plug into Kutztown’s network because she lives outside town limits, but this is something that small college towns everywhere should be looking at. And small non-college towns, too.