Going home: Are rural residents second-class citizens in the digital divide?

I just got back from a long weekend in a place that is defying the economic downturn, where there is a housing shortage because of all of the people flocking to the area, where the local restaurant has to close early because there aren’t enough workers – and where you can’t walk in a store to buy an iPhone or a Storm.
I just went back to Williston, N.D., my childhood home, to see relatives over Thanksgiving. Williston is a microcosm of some of the things that are wrong with the wireless industry today. There are two carriers in town: Verizon Wireless and Alltel, both CDMA carriers. Verizon Wireless, as you know, is buying Alltel. Williston is one of the markets Verizon Wireless must sell to complete the deal. But who will want to buy Alltel’s CDMA network there? AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA don’t have a presence in town. So how do you bring competition to a place with a total population of 16,000? Assuming 100% cellphone penetration and that half the people would churn to a new carrier, is there a GSM-based carrier that needs another 8,000 customers enough to build a network? Not that I can think of. Perhaps the markets for sale in the northern states cluster enough to make a good business, but eastern Montana, the western Dakotas and Wyoming are sparsely populated no matter how you spin it. Regional CDMA operator U.S. Cellular may be interested in expanding its presence further west, and perhaps one of the CDMA flat-rate providers may sense a good deal in Williston, but who’s to say?
The irony is that Williston is in the midst of an oil boom. The people in town are the perfect candidates for the newest technology: They have the money to buy high-end devices, and they’d likely use a lot of minutes and bytes. Oilfield personnel by definition spend a lot of time in the field, where the rigs are, so they are an extremely mobile demographic. The other industry in Williston is farming, again a mobile demographic. BlackBerrys are as prevalent as the Cadillac Escalades and Ford F-350s that drive down Main Street – but not the Storm.
Due to high demand, Verizon Wireless is only selling the store through company-owned stores right now and the closest one is more than 200 miles away. No wonder rural residents often feel like second-class citizens in the digital divide.