High-speed Internet access to Appalachian Ohio

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Greg McKinniss lives on a farm in the rolling hills of Jackson County in Appalachian Ohio, hoping his daughters will soon be able to enlist high-speed Internet for help with school research projects.

In many rural areas, broadband services aren't available at all or come from a single provider. Verizon Communications Inc. provides coverage to Jackson County, but the service doesn't reach McKinniss' farm.

"I have called Verizon several times trying to get it," said McKinniss, a manager for Industrial Timber and Land Company. "They keep telling me to call back."

Calls to expand broadband service in the U.S. have been going out for years, but few states have succeeded in extending the technology to their remotest regions.

About 55 percent of Ohio residents have broadband service in their homes, with coverage higher in urban areas, according to Connect Ohio, a nonprofit group hired by the state to conduct the first comprehensive study of broadband service in Ohio. The group planned to release its results Friday.

Fewer than 36 percent of residents in Ohio's Appalachian counties, home to 1.5 million people scattered over the southern and eastern parts of the state, have broadband in their homes, the study said.

Technology has left behind rural Americans before. It took one of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs to extend electricity to rural areas in the 1930s.

The problems of broadband deployment in rural areas are much the same as the forces that delayed the arrival of electricity:

_Isolation and rugged topography impedes the technology's reach.

_Potential customers don't know what they're missing, so they aren't demanding the service.

_Rural poverty means customers can't pay to have service extended to their home.

_Providers avoid rural areas because they can't get enough customers to justify their investment.

The lag in Ohio remains despite the availability of a prominent type of broadband, Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL), going from virtually nonexistent in 14 Appalachian counties in 2002 to being in all but one country two years later.

During the same span, availability of cable broadband, the type provided by cable television companies, increased significantly as well.

"We're trying to move out of the ice age," said Jackson County Commissioner Ed Armstrong. "It's gaining in importance. They (businesses) know that they are dependent on being able to communicate with the globe."

Among the personal benefits, rural residents could have their children examined by a top-notch urban physician through a broadband connection. Students could take classes online and others could work from home in an era of ever higher fuel costs.

"These things are all quality of life related," said U.S. Rep. Zack Space, who represents an Appalachian district and formed a separate task force to study the issue. "This is every bit as important as was access to electricity several decades ago."

The telephone survey by Connect Ohio provides broadband companies with customer information they couldn't _ or wouldn't _ have been able to get on their own. The group hopes it will provide all interested parties with the knowledge of exactly where broadband coverage lags.

"I see this as very much like the rural electricity projects in the 1930s and 40s," said state Rep. Clyde Evans, who represents several Appalachian counties, including Jackson. "If government had not gotten involved we would have never had it out there. I think government has to get involved with the businesses that do this."

Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Administration, created in 1935, gave loans to communities and businesses that formed rural cooperatives that would build the necessary infrastructure.

The public-private cooperation overcame the same problem that private industry says it has encountered today in trying to spread broadband into rural areas _ there is no profit to be made.

"There are economic and technological challenges that all providers face when they are looking at expanding broadband service to more rural areas," said Verizon spokesman Lee Gierczynski. "In most places the market is working, but in places where broadband is not available and where it's not economically feasible for the private sector to serve, it helps to enter into partnerships."

DSL connections require customers to be no farther than 18,000 feet from a "switching" station. Fiber-optic cables involve laying thousands of miles of cable underground through rolling topography. And wireless signals are often relayed from mountain tops so they don't reach down into the valleys below.

Getting broadband through a satellite is an option, but is considerably more expensive.

Beyond the large-scale technological challenges, research by Connect Ohio has shed light on other obstacles.

In the survey, the lack of a computer was cited nine times more often than the cost of broadband service as the main barrier to Internet adoption. And of the 45 percent of individuals with no broadband service, half believe they do not need it.

Connect Ohio is just as much of a marketing strategy to promote broadband as it is a project to gather information from individual providers and present it as a business case to the industry as a whole.

"Sometimes the biggest barrier to broadband adoption is sort of the awareness of the value of broadband," said Brian Mefford, chief executive of Connected Nation, of which Connect Ohio is a subsidiary. "The onus is on us to make the case that it makes good sense to have broadband at home."

To address computer ownership, Connect Ohio is collecting donations from private industry to help with its No Child Left Offline initiative, which will provide computers to low-income children.