Small-town utilities bring broadband to the countryside
ADEL, Ga. (AP) — Paula Crosby’s dial-up Internet connection was so slow she played computer solitaire while waiting for sluggish pages to appear. And when her teenage daughter surfed the Web, it tied up the family’s phone line for hours.
Thanks to their town’s leap into wireless broadband, the Crosby family now connects seven times faster for $24.95 per month, about what they paid for dial-up.
Adel, 250 miles south of Atlanta, has joined the growing ranks of rural communities that offer some type of broadband Internet service — wireless, cable, DSL or signals over electrical lines — through municipal utility companies.
Some are comparing the community broadband movement to efforts that began in the late 1800s and continued through the 1930s to bring electricity to America’s small towns and rural areas.
Of the nation’s 2,000 public electric systems, 134 now provide Internet service, 128 provide broadband connections, 76 provide cable-modem DSL, and 39 offer wireless networking.
Georgia already has at least four wireless towns and there are plans to make Houston County, south of Macon, the state’s first wireless county this year.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Communications Commission have formed a partnership to bring wireless technology to rural areas, and the FCC announced in November that it would expand wireless-device frequencies to clear the way for more rural high-speed connections.
“Adel is a good example of a community that saw its needs and took matters in its own hand,” said Jim Baller, a Washington attorney who represents public power utilities and the 2,000-member American Public Power Association.
Municipal utility companies began electrifying small towns in the 1890s.
“Thousands of communities were left in the dark until they formed their own electric utilities,” Baller said. “Those that did were largely successful and many that didn’t became ghost towns.”
By the 1930s, 90 percent of urban residents had electricity, compared to 10 percent of rural dwellers. Some power companies said farmers couldn’t afford electricity and balked at the expense of stringing wires to rural homes. President Roosevelt’s Rural Electric Administration helped create 417 cooperatives to electrify the backwoods.
Proponents of municipal broadband say traditional providers, such as telephone and cable television companies, have been unwilling to upgrade their systems to serve rural customers. They compare it to the reluctance of power companies a century ago to expand beyond cities.
With municipal utilities stepping in to fill the technology gap, some say it’s creating a reverse digital divide, where a growing number of country folks have better connections than their urban cousins.
Adel officials decided to go wireless after a communications company pulled out a few years ago and left the town with a fiber-optic system that was already connected to the state’s Internet backbone. They opted for wireless to avoid the high cost of running cable to each home.
Signals from a 190-foot antenna reach all over town and even connect farm houses up to 8 miles away. Customers get indoor wireless modems about the size of a paperback book. Those farther out use external antennas.
Rural residents are hungry for high-speed Internet connections, said Carl Peedy, president of Tri-State Broadband, a suburban Atlanta company that has assisted Adel and Georgia’s other wireless communities — Nahunta, Pelham and Ellaville. The company also will assist Dothan, Ala., and is negotiating with communities in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
“The interest in wireless has boomed over the last couple of years,” he said. “The technology has come together, the prices have come down. People … want to cut the umbilical cord that has been tying them down.”
Rural communities are finding that high-speed Internet access is an essential business tool that can help attract and keep industries.
“The metropolitan areas were enjoying being at the forefront of technology. The rural areas were being left out,” said Adel City Manager Jerry Permenter. “Industries looking at Adel were asking “What services do you have for broadband?’ There were very few providers.”
Adel launched its wireless service — Southlink.us — last October, offering residential and business service for $24.95 to $99.95, depending on connection speeds.
Mrs. Crosby and her husband, James, needed no coaxing after testing the system at City Hall.
“It blew me and my husband away,” said Mrs. Crosby, a greeter at Adel’s Waffle House restaurant. “The instant I touched it, I was connected. It couldn’t believe how fast it is.”
And now, friends won’t get as many busy signals when they phone the Crosby home.
“I like getting my phone back,” she said.
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On the Net:
Adel’s Southlink.us: http://www.southlink.us
Tri-State Broadband: http://www.trisbb.com/index.php
American Public Power Association: http://www.appanet.org/
The Baller Herbst Law Group: http://www.baller.com/index.html