[SMCARA] Wireless access lets rural areas bridge digital divide

[JD Delancy]

On the front page of this morning's (10/06/05) Baltimore Sun:


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 Wireless access lets rural areas bridge digital divide
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 Many eager for high-speed Internet connections find usual broadband options
geographically, financially out of reach

 By Jamie Smith Hopkins
 Sun reporter

 October 6, 2005
 Al Hammond was tired of swearing at his sluggish dial-up Internet
connection, but he lives in a pocket of the upper Eastern Shore that had no
cheap high-speed alternative. In many parts of rural Maryland, wide open
spaces - or mountains - rule out cable and DSL access.

 Hammond, undeterred, set off to build a high-speed system himself.

 This is happening across the state - and across the nation - as workers,
business owners and local governments tire of waiting for telecommunications
giants to reach into the least populated spots. Many are giving new wireless
technology a try because it covers more ground for less money.

 The efforts are born of frustration and desperation. With affordable
high-speed Internet access now as much a requirement for robust economic
development as highways and electricity, communities that don't have it are
getting left behind. Most businesses - from one-person consulting firms to
major employers - prefer broadband.

 "It is the backbone infrastructure of the knowledge economy," said Aris
Melissaratos, Maryland's secretary of business and economic development. "We
made dramatic progress in getting Verizon to put in nodes in most towns in
the rural areas, but if you happen to be five miles from town, you have a
hard time."

 That's beginning to change.

 Hammond's year-old Bay Broadband Communications LLC is attaching radios to
towers, grain elevators and other tall structures on the Eastern Shore to
send and receive data as microwave signals. The system is operational in
Kent County, the northern side of Queen Anne's and the southern side of
Cecil, and his company will be working its way down, aided by a $4.3 million
federal loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 In Worcester County on the lower Shore, a nonprofit co-op with a $500,000
local government grant is installing its own wireless equipment to reach
into far-flung, unconnected corners of the community. Caroline County's
government is doing the same - it hopes to offer service to the public next
year, probably through a nonprofit - while Easton's municipal utility is
using wireless technology to reach outside the town into uncovered
territory.

 In Western Maryland, Allegany County invented its own open-access wireless
network that's about to be rolled out to users through private Internet
service providers.

 In Southern Maryland, a government study released this week about
high-speed dead zones in the tri-county area recommends that local leaders
in St. Mary's, Charles and Calvert counties recruit a business to build a $4
million wireless network - or build it themselves.

 Even the state government is considering the possibility of developing a
network to fill in service gaps. Melissaratos hopes to have a plan in place
in several months.

 About 15 percent of the country does not have the option to buy cable
Internet or DSL, the digital subscriber lines run by phone companies, said
Lindsay Schroth, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, a Boston technology
research and consulting firm. The farther you live or work from sizable
cities, the more likely you'll have problems.

 Electricity and telephone service were also slow to come to rural America,
and for the same reason: Providers concentrated on putting the costly lines
where they would serve thousands of customers rather than dozens. Co-ops
eventually formed to deal with the gaps.

 Both Verizon and Comcast have spent the past few years - and millions of
dollars - rolling out high-speed service to communities outside the
Baltimore-Washington corridor. But residents and businesses say there are
still many places that neither have reached. Even in towns, blank spots
remain.

 "Economically, it doesn't make sense to run cable to some of these places,"
said Henry Pearl, general manager for Comcast of Delmarva, which in Maryland
offers high-speed service in parts of seven Shore counties. "We'll expand
the footprint ... wherever it makes sense to do that, where there's a
customer base that will pay for that construction over time."

 Price is another problem. Colotraq, a New Jersey consulting firm that helps
businesses purchase telecommunications services, said the monthly price for
T1 service - a dedicated high-speed connection for businesses - ranges from
about $390 to $600 in Baltimore but would likely cost $700 to $900 in the
countryside. Get out far enough, residents say, and it tops $1,000.

 When Bay Broadband sent an Internet service questionnaire to Shore
businesses this year, the responses captured this frustration.

 "We got quite a few that said 'help!'" noted Hammond, who works on wireless
technology applications in developing countries for his day job at a
Washington think tank.

 He lives four miles outside Chestertown, with no option for DSL or cable,
and he's hardly unusual. More than two-thirds of Eastern Shore residents
live outside incorporated towns, according to the most recent census
estimates.

 A typical problem for rural areas is the extra cost for bandwidth - the
communications channel's capacity - because data has to be transported
dozens of miles from a wholesaler in a city.

 To keep his costs down, Hammond is building a 260-mile wireless backbone
connecting the Shore and Southern Maryland to Baltimore and Washington so he
can buy cheap bandwidth there.

 The Lower Shore Broadband Cooperative, the Worcester County nonprofit, is
hoping to find its own wholesale solution. But right now it's focusing on
connecting the unconnected parts of Maryland's southeastern corner.

 "There is no competition down here at all," said Diana Nolte, acting
general manager of the co-op and owner of two Internet-reliant businesses.
"We have a significant number of businesses that are on what we're calling
our early adopters list ... because they're stuck on dial-up."

 TWM Enterprises, for instance. That's Ted Merrill's consulting business - a
computer-installation and Web site-building consulting business, so there's
a certain irony that he's had to dial into the Internet since July. He moved
within Worcester to a wooded area outside the community of Stockton and
discovered that he can't even get satellite Internet service there.

 He'll be one of the first to take advantage of the co-op. He expects to be
wireless by the end of the month.

 "If it wasn't for that, I'd never get broadband in here," said Merrill. "It
takes about five minutes to download, say, a 1-million-byte file on a
telephone line, and it takes about 15 seconds on broadband, so that's the
difference you're talking about."

 Hilary B. Spence, vice president of the Talbot County Council, was
overjoyed to finally get off dial-up in August because she does a lot of
work that would benefit from higher speeds, from downloading documents to
sending mass e-mails. EastonOnline, an Internet service provider run by
Easton's municipal utility, set up a wireless connection at her home five
miles from town as part of its foray into unserved communities.

 "We have a lot of people who work from their homes over here," Spence said.
"In terms of economic development, it may be we will get more ... people
wanting to be here half-time and have an office somewhere else half-time,
because now finally they're going to have the communications ability to do
that."

 Mountainous Allegany County, which has limited DSL and cable access, is
also hoping for an economic boost as it eliminates the digital divide. The
local government's wireless network - which the public should be able to use
in a few weeks - covers 80 percent of the residential areas and 95 percent
of businesses, said lead engineer Jeff Blank.

 A report released yesterday by a firm that advises telecommunications
companies says municipalities often significantly miscalculate how much it
will cost to run broadband services. Allegany is hoping to avoid trouble by
staying out of the providing business. A Salt Lake City company is operating
and maintaining the $4.7 million network; any Internet service provider can
use it to connect customers. One has signed on and others are negotiating.

 "Now all of a sudden, from an economic development standpoint, Allegany
County - on both large and small types of communications services - can be
competitive with major metro areas," said David Kartchner, president of
Conxx, the network operator.

 Allegany badly needs that equal opportunity. It has averaged a 6.7 percent
unemployment rate this year, compared to 4.4 percent statewide. Employers in
the county added a total of 24 jobs between 1999 and 2004, according to the
state.

 Economic developers say access does make a difference in job creation.
Consider Thad Bench, who moved to Kent County three years ago. He brought
his marketing services firm over from Annapolis last year when he realized
he could get Internet via satellite.

 That was OK, he said, but not great - one of satellite's typical downfalls
is slow upload time, which meant that the image-heavy files he sent to
clients bogged down.

 Now his 17-employee Benchworks Inc. is on wireless as one of Bay
Broadband's first customers, and everything zips. He can't think of a better
solution: A T1 line would have cost him "tens of thousands of dollars" to
install, and neither DSL nor cable come close to his company's converted
dairy barn in the middle of a thousand acres of farm fields.

 "We're not at the end of the Earth, but you can see it from here," Bench
joked. "This is a lifeline for our business."

 jamie.smith.hopkins at baltsun.com

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