Steve and Jennifer Smith have their fingers in many pies around Imperial, Nebraska. In 1996 he started Chase3000, one of America's smallest Internet service providers. They also run EIII, Inc. a non-profit whose project goal was to support the community teams through the use of ICT. Some members had accounts on Chase3000, and EIII also ran listservs for the group. The organizational training they received through the workshops helped them improve their knowledge of taxes and other grant opportunities. In April 1999 they applied for a Rural Utilities Service matching grant. This Department of Agriculture agency had been known as the Rural Electrification Administration and was responsible for helping farms get electricity after World War II. At present, they made loans and grants to rural telephone companies and coops to improve service.

The heart of the plan (RARE: Rural Area's Right to Equal Access) was the use of radios and special antennas to connect townspeople and farmers living outside of Imperial with the high speed line running to the Smith's home office. The T1 connection runs at 1.56 million bits per second over copper and fiber optic landlines. Using unlicensed public radio spectrum in the 2.4 GHz range, the commercial radios and antennas can link up the remote sites to Smith's office at a nominal 11 megabits per second. In reality the speeds were closer to 4 megabits per second or several times faster than the link to the external Internet. Many large companies offering DSL, satellite, and cable modem services over the past few years have promised too much and when users saturated the network or were unable to lower the expectations (much of the time in reaction to the marketing propaganda of the companies) there was, shall we say, great disappointment. This resulted in angry user groups, class action suits, and migration to other firms promising more speed, stability or responsiveness. The customers in Imperial were not very demanding (yet). Most of them had been using dialup modems that peaked at 50 kilobits per second. Users outside of town could not connect even at those speeds.