For Marvin Waterhouse, it meant doubling the number of buyers at his livestock auctions.

For the city of New Hampton, it meant retaining its largest employer.

And for hundreds of other rural Iowa communities and residents, high-speed Internet access has made the difference between being isolated in a small town and being accessible in a global economy.

“It’s just as important as a highway,” said Tammy Robinson, New Hampton’s assistant director of economic development.

Talk of a digital divide between urban and rural America has persisted since the dawn of the Internet age. But today, businesses such as Waterhouse’s Manchester Auction and rural communities such as New Hampton are evidence that the divide has been narrowing and is continuing to do so, allowing these towns and businesses to remain competitive.

“You can’t be isolated out here,” Robinson said. “Without the technology in rural America, there is no way we could recruit. If we don’t have the same technologies as the Des Moineses and the Dubuques, the companies aren’t going to look at us.”

A recent study, the fifth in an ongoing series by the Iowa Utilities Board, found that rural communities are getting connected and, for the first time, at a faster rate than the state’s non-rural communities. From July 2004 to January 2006, the number of rural communities with high-speed Internet access increased by 35.2 percent. The number of non-rural communities with high-speed service increased by 13.6 percent during that same time frame.

The report, released last month by the IUB, said the increased high-speed access in rural communities was primarily a result of efforts by Iowa Telecommunications Services Inc. to have digital subscriber line service deployed to all of its exchanges by mid-2005. Iowa Telecom spokesman Dan Eness said the multiyear, multimillion-dollar Connect Rural Iowa initiative, launched in 2004, is elevating the company’s entire statewide network and providing access to rural businesses and residents who, until now, have been relegated to dial-up access or, in some cases, no Internet access at all.

“Telecommunications is changing so much, and we’re making sure the rural communities aren’t left behind,” he said.

When the first IUB study was conducted in 2000, 28 percent of rural communities had access to one or more types of high-speed Internet technology. That percentage climbed to 67.8 percent in 2003 and 72.6 percent in 2004. The most recent study found that 95.3 percent of rural communities have high-speed access, compared with 84.3 percent of non-rural communities.

Rob Hillesand, an information specialist for the IUB, said the numbers can be deceiving. Many of the communities that have yet to be connected to high-speed lines are small towns of 200 or 300 people. If those communities are near an urban area and are in an urban telephone exchange, they fall under the non-rural category.

Telecommunications industry projections for the next study, expected to be released next summer, are far less aggressive than what has been seen over the past six years, in part because Iowa Telecom has already completed its rollout of high-speed service to all of its telephone exchanges. Overall, the industry expects to introduce only four Iowa communities from January 2006 through January 2007, bringing the statewide total of communities with high-speed access to 93.3 percent. After January 2007, 83 communities still will not have access to high-speed Internet services, only four of which have a population over 500.

But Hillesand said there is no denying the progress made to date in Iowa’s rural communities.

“If you compare the numbers from 2000, when the first survey was done, and the most recent one that just came out and look at the communities and percentages, it’s blatantly obvious,” Hillesand said.

The IUB is keenly aware of the economic development implications of a statewide rollout of high-speed Internet access. People in rural Iowa frequently make comments to the agency about high-speed Internet access and its role as a powerful economic development tool, Hillesand said.

The city of New Hampton witnessed that firsthand several years ago when faced with the possible loss of its largest employer, TriMark Corp. The New Hampton-based manufacturer, which works with large global clients such as Caterpillar Inc. and operates a plant in the United Kingdom, began to receive a greater number of requests from customers asking the company to implement tools such as an online catalog and an online ordering system.

But without high-speed Internet access in New Hampton, TriMark’s technological capabilities were significantly limited, and the company had to seriously consider moving to a town that could offer high-speed Internet access.

“We had lost Sara Lee right in that area, so we had to make sure we took care of our largest industry,” Robinson said.

New Hampton considered installing a city-financed high-speed service line, but Iowa Telecom stepped into the picture after purchasing GTE Communications Corp.’s infrastructure in New Hampton and other communities and took the initiative in bringing high-speed access to New Hampton.

TriMark never left town, and the city built a video conference center to be accessed not only by TriMark, which eventually bought the conference center, but also businesses and individuals from New Hampton and the surrounding communities, even coming from as far as Waterloo.

“I think we were probably forced to be a little ahead of the curve because of our largest industry forcing us to do so,” Robinson said.

Waterhouse, owner of Manchester Auction in Manchester, said high-speed Internet access “expanded our horizons” when it was introduced in his community just over three years ago. Using DSL, Manchester Auction uploads video and audio from its livestock auctions, which can then be accessed worldwide via the Internet.

Since Manchester Auction began offering live broadcasts, Waterhouse said it has, on average, doubled the number of buyers participating in each auction. Buyers from about 14 or 15 states typically participate in each auction, he said.

“I think small-town America, just by virtue of being physically separated from the larger communities, there was this sense of isolation out here in your own part of the world,” Waterhouse said. “Modern technology and the Internet have kind of helped narrow that divide to where you’re not feeling like you’re out on the prairie all by yourself. You still have that sense of pride being in small-town America, but now you can get anything you want in less than 48 hours, whether it comes out of Cedar Rapids or Paris, France.”

Jennifer Daly, executive vice president of the Mount Pleasant Area Development Commission, said high-speed Internet access alone won’t be sufficient much longer. Most companies expect that all communities, rural and non-rural, will have high-speed Internet access. Now, she said, employers don’t want to know if you have a system; instead they want to know how good your system is. Mount Pleasant is one of several Iowa communities looking into the possibility of establishing a community-wide wireless Internet network.

“The biggest issue we have is that it’s not enough anymore to provide high-speed access where (the businesses) are located,” Daly said. “They want their professionals to be able to access high-speed Internet in their homes so they can work from home.” That particularly applies to outlying communities and residences, such as farms, where high-speed lines do not reach, a problem providers such as Iowa Telecom have been addressing.

“Through Connect Rural Iowa, we continue to develop new ways of extending that DSL further and further out,” Eness said. “Just because we reached that milestone (of providing high-speed access to Iowa Telecom’s entire statewide network) doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels. We continue to improve telecommunications for everyone.”