A Region of Broadband Have-Nots

The News & Advance
Published: May 15, 2008

In this day and age, Internet access — fast Internet access — is almost an economic necessity. That’s what makes a recent study on broadband penetration rates so disturbing.

Last month, New York-based Scarborough Research released a ranking of 79 of the nation’s largest U.S. markets, detailing the percentage of households that had a broadband connection. Where did the 25-county, Lynchburg/Roanoke region rank? Dead last, with only 29 percent of households having broadband.

For an ever-shrinking number of Internet users, dialup access is all they need to occasionally check e-mail and do a limited amount of Web surfing. The wave of the future, though, is for broadband — shopping, banking, working from home, Web conferencing and so forth.

The region’s rural nature, the biggest appeal of Central and Southwest Virginia to newcomers, is also its biggest drag on the number of households with broadband access.

Households in the urban areas of Lynchburg, Roanoke and Blacksburg do take advantage of the access to broadband; the problem arises in the rural hinterland.

The majority of Americans who have broadband have either a cable or DSL high-speed connection. Both types of connections are hampered by the would-be subscriber’s location; either a cable line feeds straight into the home or the house must be located within a certain distance from the telephone company’s switching station.

Other types of high-speed connections that could help rural areas are either expensive, niche solutions (e.g., satellite with a spotty record of reliability), relatively new (WiMAX) or still a dream (access through electric power lines).

Rural Americans, rural Virginians will be at distinct economic and educational disadvantages until the problem of bringing inexpensive, reliable broadband access to the hinterland is solved.

Broadband would allow highly educated workers to relocate to rural areas to live and raise their families, while telecommuting to their home offices. Broadband would make rural areas more competitive to traditional, on-site employers and manufacturers who need to have a high-speed connection to their other facilities and their customers. Broadband would also give rural areas a leg up in holding onto their young, droves of whom today go off to college and don’t return because of a lack of modern amenities.

Political leaders haven’t been blind to this problem, though, and that’s a good sign for the future.

In the towns of Appomattox and Brookneal, for example, the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission has funded projects to wireless, WiMAX Internet access to areas where traditional high-speed access just can’t reach.

Also locally, Campbell County and Region 2000 are conducting broadband surveys to determine exactly where the underserved areas are, all to give planners a better handle on where to direct their energies.

Speaking in Lynchburg last week, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Warner prominently mentioned rural broadband access as one of the most important initiatives he’d undertake if elected to Congress. As governor, he was instrumental in beginning early efforts to extend a fiber optic network along the U.S. 58 corridor in economically challenged Southside Virginia.

Rural America, in order to remain economically and socially viable, needs to be moving as fast as possible to get into the fast lane of the Information Superhighway.

If we don’t, we’ll all just be cyber-roadkill.