Old Westerns were filmed in the desert and small towns of Death Valley, Arizona, Nevada, and southern Utah. The coffee they made for the cowboys in those days was brown and bitter, almost without flavor beyond the alkali that was in the ground-water it was made from. And that coffee survives in these areas until today. You can drive for 500 miles in these wild western areas and never find anything resembling the coffee we're used to in urban areas. Trust me, I just did drive two 500 mile legs without a flavorful cup of coffee. In the western hinterlands, old habits die harder than the decrepit towns like Tonopah or Beatty, NV. The very first caffe serving real Cappuccino west of the Mississippi was established in 1956. San Francisco's Caffe Trieste has been in business since then, yet even with the thousands of Starbucks and Pete's that followed in their wake, there's still a lot of wide open spaces in the west where Italian coffee has zero market penetration. Not so with broadband and wireless internet. In driving 2500 miles around the west this week, there was a wireless internet connection in anything you'd identify as a town. Even in the no-name motels (no, not that kind of motel) of Beatty and Tonopah, there were lots of signals available without charge. If you think back just 10 years ago, only the true geek had wired his house for ethernet...and wireless was unheard of even in Silicon Valley Things changed fast in the hinterland. This is perhaps the most meaningful measure of market penetration: how far away can you be from X technology, if you're travelling in rural areas? These days for the Internet, not very far. The related measure -- velocity of market penetration -- is also stunning. Thanks to VSAT terminals and cable TV, in only 10 years broadband internet has penetrated more geography than AM radio did over an 80 year period. The final measure -- social impact -- has yet to be really seen. But it seems pretty reasonable to me that internet in the hinterlands will have as much power as TV did to change people's lives and broaden perspectives. Of course, that power isn't all positive...but who knows, next time I'm out in the wild west the yokels will have discovered the joys of a caffe machiato grande.