On average, Kansas residents have just as much access to broadband Internet services as everyone else in the country.

And the state’s treading of high-tech waters has a handful of lawmakers looking for ways to push ahead in the race to get high-speed connections into the state’s slowest-growing areas.

“If we want to avoid a digital divide and an economic divide in our state, I think we need to have access available to everyone,” said state Rep. Tom Sloan, R-Lawrence, and member of the House utilities committee. “If it’s available, people will sign on. It’s just like anything else. Everybody didn’t jump on an airplane the first time they saw one, but now we’re dependent upon airplanes, cars, the Internet. It’ll be the same way with broadband.”

Just how to spur the extension of broadband services into rural areas dominated discussion Thursday during the Kansas Telecommunications Stakeholder Summit, which drew 50 lawmakers, industry officials and regulators to Kansas University.

Lawmakers said they were interested in finding ways to help telecommunications companies extend their reaches beyond urban areas and into less-profitable or even economically unfeasible small towns and rural communities.

But Thursday’s discussion yielded few answers. Sloan and others suggested coming up with subsidies to make it worth a company’s while to run fiber lines or install wireless communications equipment in the least-populated areas of the state.

But company representatives cautioned that even with financial help, the investment still might not pay off. Cox Communications, for example, spent recent years installing lines in Iola, Kinsley and several dozen other small Kansas towns.

The company had expected to sign up 25 percent of accessible customers, but thus far has managed to ink 6 percent.

“It’s embarrassing to say it, but it’s going to take an enormously long time to regain that investment,” said Jay Allbaugh, vice president of governmental affairs for Cox in Kansas and Oklahoma. “We’re going to need more than 15 years to get that back.”

Diane Law Hsu, an attorney for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, told summit participants that Kansas rated in the middle of the pack among states in terms of broadband use. As of the end of last year, she said, Kansas had 193,568 high-speed lines in place for the state’s nearly 1.04 million housing units.

That translates to 0.19 lines for each household, equal to the national average. Missouri, meanwhile, checked in with 0.12 lines per household.

The industry is waiting to see the details of an upcoming FCC ruling that will govern how much access regulated phone companies, such as SBC, will have to provide to competitors, and how much the companies will be able to charge their competitors for such access.

SBC is waiting for the detailed ruling’s release before deciding how far to extend its DSL network into underserved areas of Kansas.

Hsu declined Thursday to speculate on the pending ruling’s contents, which she said would be released “really, really soon.”

“We’re trying to do what we can to make the environment more conducive to investment,” Hsu said. “If there is a problem, at some point the commission might step in. But at this point, the first step is to at least try to let the market work.”