On a sloping hillside, Jack Kennedy cultivates 60 varieties of daylilies. He calls himself the “daylily man,” an interloper from the North who moved to his mountain perch in Rutherford County, North Carolina, to retire to his dream home and sink his hands into the earth.

Jack thought he chose his final destination wisely. Rutherford County’s charm is its isothermal belt, a climate phenomenon that leads to consistently mild temperatures. There are 200 frost-free days in the growing season, a gardener’s delight.

“It’s such a joy to sit amongst such quietude,” Jack says. “We really love it.”

Jack Kennedy: "We're relegated to dial-up."

But when Jack decided to venture back into the business world, becoming an online seller of daylilies, his remote homestead became a barrier. High-speed Internet lines do not snake up his hill, and he spends hours on his dial-up connection trying to post a single photo of his wares.

“Struggles? Oh, that’s an apt word for the situation in this county.” Jack scoffs. “We’re relegated to the dial-up service, where, ‘Oops, we had a problem on our servers today. Oops, a telephone line went down. Oops, you can’t get it.’”

Jack’s computer is in the loft, which his wife scornfully calls “up there” for all the time Jack spends trying to get online.

“Oh, you want to download something?” he says. “You look at Yahoo! News and when you finally get there, and it shows that video, forget about it. Or one of my children will send me a picture of one of my grandchildren. That e-mail that has a picture of family perhaps takes as much as 45 minutes to an hour to download. And of course, when you’re downloading something like that, you can’t do anything else on the computer. You’re basically locked out of the computer.”

Using dial-up for another hobby – online stock trading – is “frustrating as the dickens, impossible to enjoy,” Jack says, and becomes “more drudgery than anything else.”

“You go to enter a trade, or buy or sell, and it clunks and clunks and clunks,” Jack says. “And five minutes later, it may complete the transaction, but by that time the stock price may have dramatically changed in today’s rapid times.”

Fed up with his limited connectivity, Jack turned activist, organizing dozens of other households in his area to sign a petition to AT&T stating that they would pay for DSL service. “The response was, ‘Gee whiz, that’s not in our plans,’ ” Jack says. “The final response from AT&T corporate was, ‘We are offering high-speed, but you have to go to an outside provider that we recommend.’”

But Jack says the outside provider, a satellite service called WildBlue, was not cost- competitive. “Buy the equipment, pay the installation, and pay the monthly deal -- what a bargain,” he says.

When Jack leaves his house to run errands, he calls it a safari. Because of his remoteness and the cost of gas, he plans his trips strategically to make the journey worth his time and money. Occasionally, he treks to the library or a WiFi café where he can buy, sell and trade a stock in the time it takes him to load his e-mail at home. But even this doesn’t always make sense.

“From where I live, it’s a 35 minute trip each way,” Jack says. “So by the time I get there, what is the need of high-speed? I’ve invested an hour of my time just to get there and get back for something that may take 2 minutes if I had the high-speed.”

While Jack taps his foot impatiently at his own computer, he also knows that the Internet situation in Rutherford County goes beyond his home business and hobbies.

In North Carolina alone, nearly 5 million residents don’t have access to high-speed Internet. According to a July 2007 study, 30 percent or more of the state's population in 21 rural counties did not have high-speed Internet connectivity. And nationally, almost 40 percent of the country does not have a high-speed connection.

“I can’t imagine companies locating here that are part of multi-unit corporations that have to communicate with home offices or branches without high-speed Internet,” Jack says. “It’s just unthinkable today.”

This month, the FCC is beginning to wade through public comments on a national broadband plan, and you can still weigh in. Help get Jack Kennedy and millions of others the fast, affordable and open Internet they need.