Despite its ranks swelling by 1.5 million lines with the proposed acquisition by FairPoint Communications of Verizon customers, rural telcos attending the OPASTCO meeting last week in Orlando were still struggling with the challenges of being small.

Many of those challenges are regulatory and legislative, and to its credit, the Organization for Promotion and Advancement of Small Telecommunications Companies showed a willingness to hear both sides of various arguments.

For example, Paul Misener, Amazon's vice president of global public policy, gave the Web merchant view in favor of Net neutrality, saying that in today's Internet model, content is not pushed to the consumer by big media companies, but pulled into the network by paying consumers requesting the content. Those consumers and not the content providers, he argued, should pay the price.

“The fundamental point is content only gets introduced into the network if paying subscribers ask for it,” Misener said.

He also claimed that while carriers may swear they won't block traffic, any prioritization of traffic in an IP network is discrimination. Misener made one serious slip, which the crowd of proud network owners let slide, when he added, “To prioritize content is to degrade other content. Anyone who doesn't understand that, doesn't know how the network works.”

That's exactly the service providers' argument — that Internet companies don't understand how a network works.

President of OPASTCO, John Rose, admitted that rural companies face an uphill battle against the uninformed public opinion now lining up behind Net neutrality. “If it becomes a major issue in Congress in '07, we go from offense to defense, and it puts us not on the side of the consumer,” he said.

Resigned to the reality that with more pressing issues such as the war in Iraq, “Communications issues are way down on the list [of priorities] of this Congress,” Rose spoke of the need to be more active in order to get legislation such as the Missoula Plan passed.

“We need to be more active on two levels,” Rose said. “We need to get the Missoula Plan done so we can have a transition plan [to the next-generation network] and we have to make sure USF works for us.”

Verizon's Chief Economist Dennis Weller presented the opposing view, saying the Missoula Plan will never happen. “Stop working the problem. It's a waste of time,” he said. “There's not enough support behind it to go anywhere. The longer we hold onto something that won't work, the longer it will be before we start talking about something that will.”

Other challenges go much deeper than legislation, although legislation could help address them. Rose said rural operators need to be more creative in the revitalization of their communities and to encourage the return of commerce. Citing the rebuilding of Richmond, Va., in a single generation after the Civil War, Rose said other rural communities needed that same spirit. He also used the meeting's locale in Disney World for inspiration.

“You may not believe in all the magic of Disney, but we must become Disney. We have to become Walt Disney and create something out of nothing,” Rose said. “And it can't be just entertainment like a new movie store; it has to be real commerce.”