The need to upgrade programs and services in rural communities is rapidly moving toward a critical juncture. A rural telecommunication network could act as an equalizer through: serving information needs of people in the fields of entertainment, education, health, governments, business, and industry; or serving special populations such as the aged, handicapped, gifted, linguistically different, migrants, and veterans. This paper focuses on well-funded experiments and demonstrations which failed to take root in rural isolated soil, showing that there appears to be little which survived the initial injections of outside federal, state, or foundation funding. Problems are identified as the following: available dollars are usually for capital expenditures, seldom for programming and"software"; regulations require a "teacher of record" present in the classroom; non-technical problems (institutional and personal) are often critical; inherent conflict exists between the need for programs which can be fitted to the individual schedules of teachers and the need for large scale programming which can take advantage of economies of scale; and there is an institutional perception that telecommunications and delivery systems are a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. (AH)