Northeast Mississippi must grow high-speed Internet access and raise the technology bar for the entire region. Leaders posed that conclusion at Friday's sixth annual State of the Region Meeting at the Ramada Convention Center in Tupelo.

Dreams drive progress, and it's no different with the Internet. But financing is the engine.

"One of my dreams is to put Tippah County on the technological map," said Karl Bullock, the CEO of Dixie-Net Inc. His Ripley-based company is pursuing fiber-optic and wireless solutions that can speed the rate of business. Bullock, one of several speakers on technology, pointed to local governments in Tennessee that are installing fiber lines and leasing access because they don't want to wait for the private sector.

Without such an edge, communities can lose an edge in recruiting companies and jobs, Bullock said, and a new telecommunications system is needed.

David Rumbarger, president of the Community Development Foundation, announced the formation of the MEGAPOP Co-op, the Mississippi Economic Growth Alliance for a Point of Presence, to gain that edge.

Digital Subscriber Line access to the Internet typically is available within three miles of a BellSouth central office, but that leaves many out of the loop. It overlays high-speed Internet access on existing copper lines. Fiber-optic lines offer virtually limitless amounts of voice and data but are limited by older equipment in transmission grids.

"The next generation is the broadband cooperative here in Northeast Mississippi," Rumbarger said. "It's just a higher level of Internet access."

BellSouth's Dennis Brackin said DSL service can mean the difference between taking 31 inutes to download the entire Encyclopedia Britannica or up to 25 hours on conventional lines. This year, 75 percent of BellSouth's service area will have DSL access. Groups beyond DSL's range may petition the company to install equipment that will provide access, he said.

Companies who can gain high-speed access may use the services of an application service provider, such as Venture Technologies. The Ridgeland company has customers from Maine to California, but more than half are Mississippi firms who pay a fixed monthly fee and let Venture provide software and data storage needs via the Internet.

ASPs will be a $7.7 billion market by 2004, but high-speed access is needed to makepayroll and other data-intensive company needs practical, Venture's Wayne Gilbert said.

"That's why high-speed Internet access is critical to being able to use this business model," he said.

Richard Kuebler of RedMagnet® Technologies in Tupelo pointed to the power of technology in one of his firm's clients, www.extremeglow.com, an Internet-only seller of glow-in-the-dark products that's grown to a garage-based startup to a multimillion-dollar business in three years.

RedMagnet® also provided Web-based training solutions for BancorpSouth to steep its 2,500 employees on the full array of the bank's products and services. Leaving their work site to train would cost $300 to $500 a day, but the bank has been able to provide online training at 10 percent of that cost, at a savings or more than $500,000.

"So it's easy to see why companies are moving to e-training," he said.

Rumbarger said the MEGAPOP Cooperative is examing three ways to bridge the Internet gap: leasing existing fiber lines in the region; buying existing fiber lines from Memphis to Columbus; or, as a last resort, installing fiber-optic transmission lines itself.