There’s a terrific multimedia report that’s just been completed on the ‘digital divide’ in rural America, providing a glimpse of what life is like in some rural communities without high-speed Internet access.
The report has been released by InternetforEveryone.org, which is a broad-based iniitative to connect every American to fast, open and affordable Internet.
“More than 14.3 million rural homes across the country — 61 percent — are not connected to high-speed Internet,” said Megan Tady of Free Press, author of the report. “This isn’t just a statistic. It’s a daily reality for the millions of people who can’t go online to apply for jobs, attend classes, start home-based businesses, get news and information, and participate in the global economy.”
To examine life without high-speed Internet access, Tady traveled across North Carolina, my home state, and one hit hard by manufacturing losses over the last decade as well as our current economic downturn.
In ‘Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road’ Tady visited five very different rural counties across North Carolina. I live within seventy miles of three of the counties featured, and have conducted small business training in the fourth (Robeson County) and fifth (Person County).
And as someone who now only has to pay $79.95 a month for DSL speed of a whopping 1.5 megabits per second, let’s just say I understand their challenges all too well.
Tady’s selection of individuals within each of these counties really mirrors the diversity of rural America. She lets homeowners, a farmer, a writer, a job-seeker, and an IBM telecommuting researcher describe how their current level of Internet access limits their lives and livelihoods, and how they believe they would benefit from broadband.
Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road offers short, documentary-style videos in a five-part series:
* Day One: In Robeson County, a rural area devastated by textile plant closings, members of the local Lumbee Tribe cannot afford the high-speed Internet connections that would lead to other economic opportunities.
* Day Two: One hour north of Durham in rural Person County, farmer Jay Foushee is stuck using a slow dial-up connection to check market prices and sell his crops. His teenage daughter Julia has to leave the house each night in search of a broadband connection to do her homework.
* Day Three: Living in the Smoky Mountains outside of Asheville, writer Brooks Townes gave up his freelance career because his dial-up connection made him uncompetitive. And bed-and-breakfast owner Martha Abraham fears that her slow and unpredictable satellite connection hurts her small business.
* Day Four: In remote Spring Creek, residents are trying to revive their town by building a community center that offers a computer lab and space for local businesses, an effort that could prove futile without high-speed Internet.
* Day Five: In Rutherford County, Sam Adams, a senior IBM researcher, was forced to spend thousands of dollars to erect his own broadband tower so he could continue telecommuting.
This report will be showcased at the InternetforEveryone.org town hall meeting on the future of the Internet in Durham, N.C., on Saturday, March 7, 2009.
“High-speed Internet is a lifeline to the outside world, and a chance to overcome the limits of geography, poorly funded schools and a sinking economy,” Tady said. “Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road puts a human face on the urgent need to expand broadband across the nation to ensure the health of our rural communities and our country as a whole.”
Read and watch Five Days on the Digital Dirt Road: http://www.internetforeveryone.org/americaoffline/nc
Learn more about the North Carolina town hall meeting: http://www.internetforeveryone.org/events/durham
“Not rural sights alone,
but rural sounds,
Exhilarate the spirit, and restore
The tone of languid nature.”
William Cowper
One of the most widely read
English poets of his day, 1731-1800
“Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher quality of life not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!”
Don A. Dillman
Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending February 21, 2009:
President Obama signed the stimulus package this week, with much discussion on the funds allocated for rural America in installing rural broadband.
In Stimulus Stirs Debate Over Rural Broadband Access, you can get caught up on comments made this week by former FCC economist Michael Katz on National Public Radio (NPR), and the outrage that followed.
Katz feels that the $7.2 billion allocated to expand rural broadband could be put to better use, saying that rural parts of America are environmentally hostile, energy inefficient and even weak in innovation.
“The notion that we should be helping people who live in rural areas avoid the costs that they impose on society … is misguided,” Katz went on, “from an efficiency point of view and an equity one.”
In more hopeful news, two corporations announced their plans to provide broadband to rural America: IBM and Frontier Communications, America’s second largest rural telecommunications provider.
I.B.M. is working with rural electric cooperatives in Alabama to offer high-speed Internet service, delivered over power lines. Technology to send broadband over power lines has been around for several years, but it typically hasn’t been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone companies.
Frontier Communications chairman and CEO Maggie Wilderotter says there is a growing demand for advanced services in rural America, and that providing quality broadband internet service is the key to shoring up a rapidly evolving rural economy. Frontier already provides telephone, television, broadband and wireless services to some 2.4 million customers, and is for many the only option for those services.
Wilderotter explained that rather than farming, most rural Americans own or work for small businesses. And those small businesses “deserve better” than what many telecommunications companies have offered them, Wilderotter said. Rural customers don’t want broadband service just for watching videos, she explained, but instead need it “for commerce and education - and creating and finding jobs.”
Rural consumers are just as eager for to make full use of broadband once they get a taste of its capabilities, she said.
And to once again encourage us to look on the bright side of life, take a look at Five Silver Linings (That’s Right) of the Recession in this week’s US News and World Report.
The five ‘rays of sunshine’ they identify to show us the economy isn’t as gloomy as many people think:
1. Recessions are good for start ups
2. Borrowing Costs are lower
3. There’s a Bigger Market for Outsourced Duties
4. Some industries grow in a recession
and lastly -
5. At least you’re in America!
Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending February 7, 2009:
What The New York Times has to say this week may not be news to most of us in rural America. But odds are, it’s new information to most Americans and their fantasy of rural living being like the old “Green Acres’ television show. In “Farm Living (Subsidized by a Job Elsewhere),” the Times says that more people than ever are getting away from it all and moving to the country, but if they do, they have a lot of driving to do because most need to find employment off the farm to make ends meet.
An interesting statistic shared in that same article was that the number of organic farms rose by more than 50% from 2002 to 2007.
While farmers are just leaving the county for work, apparently rural pastors are leaving their churches for good. Rural pastors are disappearing even faster than the general rural population. According to Time Magazine in “Rural Churches Grapple with a Pastor Exodus,” fewer than half of rural churches have a full time pastor, creating a crisis of community throughout rural America. It’s no laughing matter. But I have to admit I chuckled at the quote attributed to Shannon Jung, a rural-church expert who said that one of the reasons rural areas can’t attract young pastors is, “A town without a Starbucks scares them.”
From initial reports of the compromise reached on the stimulus package in the Senate, it appears that at least 2 billion has been cut from the 9 Billion originally slotted for rural broadband. You can read more at The Back Forty. Getting rural broadband access is just half the battle, as the Daily Yonder rightfully points out. Once broadband is installed, what does Rural America do with it? Take a look at some of their ideas here.
For a market driven strategy that suggests ways to make headway with fewer Congressional dollars, review the suggestions about The Best Billion We Can Spend On Rural Broadband. And if you’ve got 90 seconds for a tutoring session on what the Stimulus is and how it works, make a quick visit over to The Center for American Progress.
In case you’re curious about how much your area and state need broadband in order to access the internet more quickly and easily, PC Magazine has a handy-dandy, clickable state map on its site. You can click on your state and find out the average internet speed in your state and compare your region of the country to others. In my case, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Charlotte have definitely skewed the numbers for North Carolina and provided a much higher ‘average’ than we experience here in Appalachia.
The Thinking Home Business blog in Australia provides an international perspective on how internet marketing efforts to make rural businesses findable online can help them thrive and survive in How Blogging can help rural and small town business.
And My Rural America provides a good run down on NON-Broadband accomplishments by President Obama and the new Congress over the last couple weeks.
Hope you have a great week!
