Could life get any better? I have a great job in the high-tech industry, and I work for a forward-looking company that has recently instituted a telecommuting policy. At the very moment when gas is hovering near $4 per gallon, I get to work at home.

Each business day I no longer need to get dressed in my work clothes and drive 12 miles to the office. There is no wear and tear on my truck or the city streets, no adding to the city's air pollution and no need for that expensive weekly fill-up at a gas station. And I sure don't need a bus or a commuter train. I put on some comfy shorts and a T-shirt, and I sit down at a computer in a gussied-up storage room we laughingly call my "home office."

So why am I only almost living the dream?

It's nice to work from home, but the goal must be to work efficiently. In my case, there is a serious "data bottleneck" between my home and the Internet. In Raleigh we have essentially two choices for Internet access: Get it from the cable company (RoadRunner from Time Warner) or get it from the phone company (DSL from AT&T). None of the current service offerings from either company is fully satisfactory. And none of these services is likely to support vigorous growth in telecommuting.

Typical broadband service in our region provides about 6 to 7 megabits per second downstream (toward the home) and 384-512 kilobits per second upstream (toward the Internet). To be reasonably efficient, I need at least 10 Mb/s in both directions. And I expect to need 100Mb/s very soon. Even folks who use the Internet only for fun are now moving large data files containing photographs, music and videos.

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THINK OF ALL THE STUFF UPLOADED TO FACEBOOK, MySpace and YouTube every day. My business is engineering, and I must often upload files of five to 50 MB to the corporate server in Silicon Valley (San Jose, Calif.). Imagine how painful that is at 384kb/s!

Now, Time Warner Cable and AT&T have what's called a "duopoly" -- a monopoly with two players. They compete, but just barely. Each has carved out a comfortable data service niche, and neither particularly wants to invest capital dollars for a system to get us the 10Mb/s minimum data rates we should all have, much less the 100Mb/s we'll soon need. What we need is real competition with at least six to eight players to ensure a robust, vibrant data services marketplace.

Amazingly, Wilson has figured out how to do it. That's right, Wilson -- the little city of 50,000 lucky folks just east of Raleigh. The city of Wilson is installing fiber-optic cables to every address. These FO cables support phone, TV and data from any number of service providers at virtually any data rates foreseeable in our lifetime.

Furthermore, the Wilson City Council decided the city itself should be a service provider. So, today, you can buy phone, TV and broadband data from the same city government that sells you water, sewer and electricity.

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BUT HERE IN THE MIGHTY RESEARCH TRIANGLE, all we get is tired old data services that are woefully inadequate. Oh, the folks at TWC and AT&T want us to think we're getting great stuff, so they give their products names like "Turbo Charged," "Ultra" and "Xtreme." But no amount of marketing hype will change the fact that folks in Wilson are getting a much better deal.

Competition is key. But competition won't happen until local governments accept their role in this enterprise -- installing the FO cables. In the 21st century, it's arguably the same municipal responsibility as building city streets.

As Wilson and other cities have shown, it is not necessary to burden local taxpayers for the total cost of installing a superhighway available to everyone. There is plenty of money to be made providing services or just leasing the FO cables to other service providers.

Of course, Time Warner and AT&T hate this idea. They are fighting tooth and nail in state legislatures all over the country to block cities from becoming competitors in the telecom marketplace.

Reminds me of that old saying, "Lead, follow or get out of the way!"

(Andy Withers is new product introduction manager at Allied Telesis Labs Inc. in Raleigh.)