The Vermont Senate has voted to speed up the permitting process for towers that will enable high-speed Internet access and cell phone service.

Vermont's challenges are manifold: sparse population, lots of hills and trees. So wireless may be a near term solution, but wifi networks are hard (and expensive) to build in these condition.

The legislation was not without its critics, suspicious of giving too much to the big telcos. As the Brattleboro Reformer reports:

If not, he said, Vermonters will be able to get "all the rock and roll tunes you’ve ever heard of," and be able to ship money out of state to pay for them but they’ll be much less able to upload and send out their own creative work product, MacDonald said.

"Economic development is based on uploading," he said. "This bill is woefully short on uploading technology."

He also said if private companies are getting public dollars to set up new fiber-optic backbones around the state, they should be required to welcome other users, even competitors, onto their networks.