Well, the county I live in is bigger than Rhode Island, but so is everything else.

Let's see -- Idaho State University and Idaho National Laboratory and the Accelerator Labs have Internet. It's 15 hops from my house to the Mudcat servers, and 20 hops in 165 microseconds to the servers of BBC World News.

The nearest backbone seems to be the Class A 15.0.0.0-15.0.0.255 (at least for one trace route), which is a direct assignment to Hewlett Packard, and that, of course, means simply that a node with one of the octets is out there. I have heard that a second-level backbone passed right through town because of INL and ISU, etc.