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With $2.7 billion in federal stimulus money devoted to the expansion of broadband Internet, Glen Wilson, owner of Rose City’s M33 Access, hopes to garner a small share for Northeast Michigan so he can blanket seven counties with high speed Internet.

Story By JERRY NUNN

ROSE CITY – Give some folks an inch and they take a mile.

Perhaps it was similar forces that drove Glenn Wilson to build a tiny dial-up Internet Service Provider north of Rose City into a broadband wireless network covering parts of 11 Northeast Michigan counties.

Completed in less than 10 years, that high tech circuit was merely the inch in Wilson’s carefully measured long-range plan.

If Wilson, owner of M33 Access, attains his latest goal, a contiguous broadband wireless and fiber optic network will blanket the region from Standish to Grayling, Harrisville to Houghton Lake.

The high-tech circuit will bring phone, computer, television and other services to every home, cottage and business in a seven county area of Northeast Michigan.

“If we can pull this off it will revolutionize the way Northeast Michigan does business,” Wilson says. “How do you explain what you can’t even visualize? What does it mean? What do you want it to mean?”

For starters, it means Wilson will take on some debt – $73 million in federal loans and grants. He submitted a 118-page application back in August and hopes to receive positive word by the end of this month.

The funding would come from a $7.2 billion pool set aside under the federal stimulus plan, with $4.7 billion administered by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration and $2.5 billion under control of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service.

Designed to accelerate broadband deployment in rural areas of the country that have been without the high-speed infrastructure, the money will be doled out in two phases with all projects awarded before September 2010.

Wilson hopes to be part of the first phase and has already invested more than $100,000 towards infrastructure studies and engineering.

But he faces competition.

Nearly 2,200 applications were submitted seeking $27.6 billion in funding, according to a press release from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and Rural Utilities Service.

Applicants include the Northern Michigan Broadband Initiative, a Grayling-based cooperative partnership of private service providers and public entities. That group submitted 33 applications worth more than $26 million for the grant portion of the funding alone with some of their geographic areas of interest the same areas that Wilson has covered for a decade now.

Both Wilson and his competitors have impressive lists of supporters, including educators, business owners, civil servants and legislators.

And federal officials are in process now of narrowing those applicants down, according to NTIA agency spokesman Mark Talbert.

“It’s September now, and we’re making the determination through due diligence which projects will make the cut to the next level,” Talbert said. In November, projects will be further reviewed with a final determination of specific awardees coming around the end of the year, he added.

Officials extend big credit to broadband services for the economic and technological advances it can bring to a region.

“The whole thing is about economic development,” says Ronald Mellon, Michigan field representative for the USDA Rural Development. “One way to promote long term and short term economic stimulus is to promote broadband in rural communities.”

While difficult to measure, the availability of broadband Internet is said to increase a communities commerce, wages, employment and property values, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration.

Many of those advantages are spelled out in Wilson’s application.

For starters it will mean high speed Internet and long distance phone service at greater speed and lower cost, according to Wilson. Residential phone and high speed Internet will cost $39.90 a month for a fiber optic customer.

But Wilson likes to put the real advances brought about by broadband in a more personal perspective, and speaks of working from home, the distant medical monitoring of the elderly and ill, as well as improved access to education.

“We’re talking on the phone right now,” Wilson says. “Why can’t I just hit the button so we can video conference?”