Unique Partnership Brings Broadband to Rural Blue Ridge
Published Mar 23, 2009
When it comes to expanding broadband coverage, rural regions such as Western North Carolina are not always a high priority for telecom decision-makers.
Cecil Groves and his staff at Southwestern Community College in Sylva found this out the hard way when they started exploring options to expand their instructional TV broadcast program.
An intensive connectivity study revealed that the school needed to update its network from analog to digital, but the infrastructure for such an update had not yet been put in place.
“In the rural areas, there’s not sufficient market here for the telecommunications companies to come in and offer such digital services because we have a very, very sparse population over some very difficult terrain,” Groves said. “To wait for the normal market to respond, to bring digital services out here that was affordable, we’d wait a long time.”
So the college linked up with Drake Enterprises and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, two other organizations in need of greater broadband service.
The partners in 2003 formed BalsamWest FiberNET, which put in place a 300-mile ring of fiber-optic cable that runs through six counties and linked every public school and hospital, a project reported to cost $13 million to $14 million.
“It’s the same thing as if you built an eight-lane highway through the mountains, except this one is electronic,” Groves says. “I think you can physically drive around this area and see the changes that are taking place.”
The broadband pipeline allows businesses, schools, hospitals and networks to transfer information at lightning speeds, making the region every bit as connected as a major metropolitan city.
The Eastern Band, for example, uses broadband to offer telehealth services in some of its clinics. Patients can go to a diabetes clinic in Cherokee for a retinopathy screening that a doctor in Asheville can review electronically that day.
“It’s a convenience factor for the patient, but it also helps in terms of consistency of care and a continuum of care for our providers,” says Susan Leading Fox, deputy of the health and medical division of the Eastern Band.
The network is also a major marketing tool for economic development, offering businesses the kind of data-transfer opportunities typically confined to big cities.
“We have built not just to try to meet demand, but to try to spur demand. We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ and we think there’s an element of truth in that with regard to high-tech, knowledge-based companies,” says David Hubbs, CEO of BalsamWest. “So we’re hopeful that what we’ve done will make our region more attractive to knowledge-based companies, but also give local companies the opportunity to grow into knowledge-based businesses with a kind of assuredness that they did not have before.”
Story by Michaela Jackson
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