To get to Wautoma, Wis., from the nearest major city - Oshkosh - you take Highway 21 through the quiet, manicured little town of Omro. You keep going through Red Granite, "Home of the State Rock" (the town's spring-fed, red-granite quarry is one of Wisconsin's best swimming spots), and head straight past the big houses and cottages along the shore of Silver Lake. At 154 E. Main St., in downtown Wautoma, in front of a green house with a slanted, creaking porch, is a hand-painted sign that reads "Wisconsin Rural Internet Parking"; an arrow points to a garage behind the house.
This is it: world headquarters of the aptly named Wisconsin Rural Internet, offering Internet access to residents in the small towns set in the rolling green forests and farmland of central Wisconsin. Inside, Mike Gustin and his mother, Diane Gustin, occupy desks in a bare-walled space that would otherwise be the dining room. Their operation may not look like much, but for as many as 37 percent of Americans, according to J.D. Power and Associates (dossier), the only way to get Internet access is from one of the thousands of mom-and-pop shops like this one.
At 25, Gustin fits the stereotype of Net entrepreneur. He's young, driven, a longtime computer buff. Only the surroundings don't fit. He's never been to Silicon Valley and has no interest in going. He doesn't want outside capital, he doesn't need well-connected partners, and he doesn't see any reason to move away from his hometown. And yet he's convinced that Wisconsin Rural Internet can become a national ISP. That's right: Wisconsin Rural Internet - which has been continually (and profitably) providing Internet access to fewer than 10,000 people in and around Wautoma for four years - is going to take on the big boys.
Mike Gustin made the plunge into the world of Internet access in 1995. He was a history student at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, Wis. Computers were just a hobby. It was his mother who first got the family involved in the Internet, when she signed her real estate office up with America Online (dossier). She didn't realize at the time that, as in most rural areas, Wautoma had no local access numbers for any of the national ISPs. A month after the office went online, Diane Gustin recalls, "we got an absolutely enormous long-distance bill, with $300 worth of charges for AOL."
Mike had just been accepted to graduate school at Notre Dame, and was planning to become a lawyer, but he started thinking he might become an ISP instead. "There was an obvious opportunity there," he says. "I was like, How hard can it be to start a Net business?"
To find out, he called an ISP in Sheboygan and quizzed the proprietor on the ins and outs of the business. Convinced he could pull it off, Gustin took out a small bank loan, bought 10 external 14.4 modems, an Acer (2306) 100MHz Pentium PC, a Livingston Portmaster modem pool, a $50 manual, and downloaded a free copy of the Linux operating system. He's been an ISP ever since.
Wisconsin Rural Internet is typical of the ISPs you'll find in small towns all over the United States. If you call during business hours, odds are Mike will answer the phone. If you have tech-support questions, he'll be the one who responds. Billing questions go to employee No. 2, Diane, who spent 20 years in real estate before joining Mike full time in April (though she still sells houses on the side). They just hired a third full-time employee to handle graphic design and field technical questions about Macs.
Still, the opportunities in Wautoma, population 2,400, will always be small. The whole of Waushara County has only about 20,000 residents. During summer months, Gustin says, that may swell to 80,000, as people come north to vacation in cottages or cabins on one of the 96
