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Broadening Virginia's Broadband

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Today, access to high speed Internet is considered as essential to modern life as electricity was, generations ago.  But most areas in rural Virginia still don’t have that level of access…and where there is high speed Internet, prices often remain high.  

“If you live in the country side it is very difficult to get it,” says Birdie Moye, Director of the Pearisburg Public Library. “Some days all our computers are booked up and a lot of them come in here to do resumes, looking for jobs, even do online schooling.”

That’s because libraries and government buildings in the New River Valley have high speed Internet, thanks to an initiative that brought a trunk line with high speed fiber optic from Wytheville to Botetourt county 5 years ago.  They call that ‘the middle mile’.  But it’s the last mile that’s always the hardest.  With few providers in sparsely populated areas, lack of competition for price and the high cost of running lines has kept localities from accessing that open access network that could bring high speed internet to homes and businesses here.  

Kevin Byrd, Executive Director of the New River Valley Regional Commission, says, “ We’re not seeing a lot of capital dollars available to make those big infrastructure investments.  The stimulus act had funding available and that’s how we built that middle mile project. There was a 20% per cent local match on that, which our local governments provided, but we just need more capital funds available to reach some of these rural areas.

The definition of high-speed broadband is a down load speed of 25 megabits per second and upload of 3 megabits.

And it’s not just the New River Valley that’s lacking high speed Internet

“Virginia is unique in having that major interconnect point and some well-served metropolitan areas, and at the same time, having areas that are incredibly underserved," says Sandie Terry, Vice President of the Center for Innovative Technology.

This week CIT published with a report on the state of broadband access in Virginia with recommendations on how to deploy it. Terry says, there are so many facets to broadband that it can be overwhelming for local officials in a state like Virginia to figure out what’s best for them.

She says, “We’re trying to boil that down and make it understandable and give them direction, because the reality is, the federal government is not going to come in and resolve this problem for everybody and the  -- we're making moves, but the state is not going to do it for everybody. It really falls to the shoulders of the local level and we want to provide as much assistance as we can.

And CIT is out with a new survey asking consumers to report on what kind of internet access they haves o it can create an accurate map based on actual service, not estimates or overviews which have proven misleading.  Terrie says such a map, could reveal practical strategies for spanning that last mile.

“And our recommendations to localities is to tell their folks, ‘Go out there and log, if you need access and you can’t get it service. And then have the local level leadership look at it – and we can provide all the maps – ‘Oh, here's a whole neighborhood that 70% of these people want access and Oh, well the cable provider is like 5 miles away’ and have a conversation with that cable provider, to say, ‘What do you we need to do?  How can we partner with you to get this extended? “

And that would be like extending an economic lifeline to communities without true, high speed Internet. According to a study published by the National Agricultural and Rural Development Policy Center, economic growth is never as strong when not just a few people in a locality have access to it. What really makes the difference, is when everyone in the region has it.

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