KUTZTOWN, Pa. -- Joanne Lapic is part-owner of a soap and bath boutique, called Paisley & Co., along Kutztown's main drag. Walk-up traffic, this day and every day, is slow.

Her business wouldn't survive without a high-speed Internet connection, she says. Lapic uses the Internet to buy ingredients for her soaps, to find new recipes for her facial scrubs, and -- most important to her bottom line -- to peddle her products to a nationwide customer base.

"Relying on walk-in traffic is idealistic," she said, scooping scented sachet beads into a pouch for a customer. "People aren't shopping on main streets unless it's a destination."

Kutztown's main street is cute, but it's not a destination. Its storefront variety is typical of college towns. There's a colorful Mexican restaurant, tanning salons, book stores, a health food mart, a second-hand clothier, several pubs and pizza joints -- and empty buildings.

City officials hope that Kutztown's homegrown high-speed Internet network -- one of just a handful of its kind in the country -- will help fill some of those buildings with niche business, "bricks and clicks" companies that depend just as heavily on Web traffic as they do the more traditional, pedestrian variety.

Places such as Kutztown, a farming valley town of 5,000, often don't have a residential high-speed Internet provider. Miles removed from the gravitational pull of urban areas such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, rural towns find themselves far down on the to-do list for regional broadband providers, such as Comcast and Verizon.

The expense of laying the infrastructure is high.

The revenue potential, in towns with just a few hundred or thousand people, is low.

And even in those rural areas where the infrastructure is already intact, providers sometimes opt not to offer cable Internet modems or high-speed phone connections, known as digital subscriber lines, or DSL. Doing so can costs millions, in upgrades to the existing system.

So small, out-of-the-way towns are years behind urban and suburban counterparts, waiting for broadband Internet to come to them even as the technology becomes more critical for students, businesses small and large, and even the average Web surfer who wants to download movies or upload family photo albums.

But Kutztown didn't wait.

In 2001, Kutztown decided to build its own network, hiring a Harrisburg-area tech firm to lay a fiber-optic ring around the town. Town officials gave the network a name, Hometown Utilicom, and by summer of 2002, the borough-owned utility was offering cheap, high-speed Internet access to any home or businesses within town limits. Today, the town has 791 subscribers, and 100 are college students.

Many of Kutztown University's upperclassmen live not in campus dorms, but downtown, above the bars and shops. With 9,000 undergraduates, Hometown Utilicom is poised to cash in on the students who don't live on campus and don't feel like waiting to use computer labs.

Sophomore Nicole Vaculi is one of them. She plans to subscribe next school year, mainly because her grades sank this year. Her depressed academic showing, she believes, is attributable to her off-campus apartment, which, unlike the university dorms, did not have a high-speed Internet connection.

"All my grades dropped because I didn't have the Internet at my hands," she said, slicing and dicing onions at a pizza shop. Friend Kelly Maga, studying and smoking at the same pizza shop, says the next apartment they lease must have a high-speed Internet connection. "It's vital to pass the classes."

Professors at Kutztown, like profs at almost every American college, do much of their communicating on the Internet now. And it's more than just e-mail, which doesn't require a high-speed connection. Professors put entire courses online. All the notes, all of the reading. You need a high-speed connection, or you need to be prepared to spend hours waiting on downloads.

Dial-up won't cut it anymore.

And so grows Kutztown's customer roster, month by month, student by student, business by business. Nearly 800 subscribers out of 2,200 homes and businesses -- that's a market penetration of 35 percent for the utility. Jaymes Vettraino, borough manager, hopes market share will eventually grow beyond 40 percent, which would allow Hometown Utilicom to begin turning a "profit" by 2009.

Hometown Utilicom's prices -- as low as $15 a month for 2 megabytes per second of transfer speed, $16 a month for cable TV -- have saved Kutztown's customers $400,000 over the last three years. "Private companies may view it as $400,000 left on the table," he said, shrugging.

They do. And as small towns see that it's affordable -- even profitable -- to build and run their own cable Internet operation, more have expressed interest in doing so. The telecom companies are losing potential customers, and revenue, bit by bit. And they're not thrilled, realizing that they've missed out by not delivering high-speed access to America's rural parts.

In Harrisburg last year, Verizon lobbied in favor of a telecommunications bill making it harder to do what Kutztown did. Cities would have to receive permission from local telephone companies to provide telecom services, including high-speed Internet, for a fee starting in 2006. (The city, however, would not need such permission if it provided the service for free.)

The law passed. It was part of a national campaign to stamp out municipal efforts to provide high-speed or wireless Internet to residents. The powerful telecom firms say they can't compete with city governments, which can subsidize their network construction with tax funds, then offer the Internet service at below-market prices.

That means if the private firm wants to compete in an area with a homegrown network, it must recoup the losses elsewhere.

There's evidence of this in Kutztown. A local telecom company, Service Electric, began offering high-speed Internet access only after Kutztown unveiled its own network. To Kutztown residents, the high-speed service costs $25 a month. But if your home is just a foot over the Kutztown borough limits, the cost rises to $45 a month.

Vettraino doesn't have much sympathy. If the town hadn't built its own network, the high-speed service still might not be available today, he said.

How long would they have waited? Hard to say. President Bush has said he wanted high-speed Internet to be available across the country by 2007. But the new Pennsylvania telecom law says Verizon and others have until 2015 to get the job done.

A Penn State study on broadband availability showed that only three-quarters of households in rural areas had access to a high-speed connection, and even if access is there, a customer's options are few. Costs vary, too, depending on where you live. Urban customers, not surprisingly, pay less than rural ones. (The study is more than a year old, so accessibility has probably improved a bit since.)

In taking matters into its own hands, Kutztown would appear to be a technology maverick. But it's also a bit of a throwback. Before big electricity companies came along, many small towns ran their own electric generators, providing juice for townspeople.

Three dozen towns still do that in Pennsylvania, and Kutztown is one of them. It's the fee-based model of taxation -- provide a utility that your residents would use anyway, charge for it, and if your business model works, other taxes stay low.

It's worked in Kutztown, at least on the electric side of things, as the local property tax rate hasn't risen in seven decades. Vettraino hopes Kutztown's Internet experiment will pay off the same way, by attracting more businesses like Lapic's, and more student customers like Vaculi and Maga, and by eventually contributing to the town coffers instead of draining them.