GAW. Great Auk Wireless, Broadband Wireless Internet Provider for Vermont, and New Hampshire.

NORTON (AP) — With dial-up Internet connections as slow as 12 bits per second, students in Vermont’s northeast corner generally don’t even try to take online courses. But all that could change, now that this hamlet hard by the Canadian border has a new onramp to the information superhighway.

“We will be able to have a normal life,” Kenn Stransky, a member of the Norton Selectboard and Planning Commission and the school board for the Essex-Northeast Supervisory Union, said Tuesday. Without it you can’t take an online college class when you can’t count on being able to send homework in, he said.

“It’ll open up unbelievable worlds for my students,” said Stransky, who is also a teacher in the adult education program in Canaan.

Many of the area’s elderly have been forced out of their homes merely because they’ve been unable to hook up heart monitors and other medical equipment to the Internet, he said.

At an afternoon ceremony on the steps of the Norton Town Hall, across Vermont Route 14 from the border station leading to Quebec, about 14 people gathered on a warm autumn afternoon to celebrate the arrival of broadband Internet access to the remote Northeast Kingdom outpost.

From faster processing of paperwork at the tiny U.S. border station, to allowing doctors to view X-rays from their offices without having to go the hospital, to letting vacationers hook into their employers’ networks, the effects will be big, said Maureen Connolly, development director with the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont.

“It’s going to impact the quality of people’s lives whether they ever use a cell phone or a computer,” said Connolly, who dreamed up the project, later dubbed North-Link, in 2002.

“Basically it’s a utility just like electricity or telephones. If you don’t have it you’re behind,” said John Watson of the Orleans-North Essex Community Partnership.

With $10.5 million in federal grant money secured mainly by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the North-Link project is stringing 375 miles of fiber optic cable in three loops touching Vermont’s eight northernmost counties.

The North-Link project dovetails with, but was in the works before, this year’s creation by the Legislature of a new Vermont Telecommunications Authority with the power to use up to $40 million in bonded money to support deployment of broadband Internet and cell phone service to underserved parts of the state.

Connolly recited an often-heard lament in an interview Tuesday: Verizon, Comcast and other major telecommunications players have been reluctant to deploy modern technology in places like Norton, year-round population about 70.

“There isn’t a good business case up here for private entities to build a network,” she said.

So the council decided to step in. Connie Stanley-Little, the council’s executive director, said the aim was not to compete with the private sector, but to provide infrastructure that would let the private sector flourish.

“We created an open-access network,” she said, adding that she hopes a range of Internet service providers will step in to provide the last mile — or few miles — of connection between the fiber-optic backbone and people’s homes and businesses. In Norton, Brattleboro-based Great Auk Wireless already has built an antenna on the top of the town office building to link individual users with the network.

“I will say that Great Auk has been investing most heavily in the Northeast Kingdom,” so they’re going to be an important player, Stanley-Little said. “But this would allow Verizon to go on and do the last miles off our network” — or other companies as well. “There’s a number of companies waiting for us to get this done.”