Today, a link to a Missoula news story flipped across my twitter feed. It announces a new fiber cable broadband system covering 300 miles across both the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal areas. In combining this new system with existing networks, most of the state from the Rockies to Idaho will be wired. This means that by 2013, Western Montana is going to have quite an extensive broadband capability across an huge area that also provides beautiful scenary, lots of land, and a motivated workforce. Now that’s a recipe for a robust economy!

So, how does Washington State compare? Not well. We may have the fastest speed in the U.S. (Ephrata, at 27Mbps download), but very little of the state has any coverage at all. Many areas within an hour’s drive of the big Microsoft campus are shockingly underserved.

Tsk,tsk,tsk…