News

Rural broadband woes

Posted May 31, 2007 11:00 pm

Jeremy Pelzer

With layer attached at end.

PETERSBURG - When Guy Sternberg wants to open an e-mail attachment from friends, it helps if he's hungry.

"If we try to send things back and forth that are attached documents and so forth that are over three or four hundred k(ilobytes) or five hundred k(ilobytes) at most, I just can't even open them," said Sternberg, who runs Starhill Forest Arboretum in southern Menard County. "I'll hit 'Open,' I'll go eat lunch and to come back before I get it done."

Sternberg, like a significant number of people in rural Illinois, doesn't have access to broadband internet options that most city dwellers take for granted: DSL, cable, or wireless internet.

Instead, people who live in the country usually have only two choices: slow dial-up modems or costly satellite internet connections.

"It's just very frustrating," said Steinberg, who uses dial-up. "It takes an awful lot of time to get something done.

"Anybody in our local area within a few miles of here has the same problem," Steinberg added. "There are a couple that've signed up for satellite service a long time ago and just pay the exorbitant cost of doing it."

Telecommunications companies say it simply isn't profitable to invest in the cables and equipment needed to offer high-speed internet to rural areas with few potential customers, though they quickly add that they are slowly, but surely, expanding broadband coverage throughout Illinois.

But many officials and researchers say rural Illinois can't afford to wait for broadband access.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of the state lacks high-speed broadband access - usually defined as Internet service at speeds exceeding 30 megabytes per second. Telecommunications companies usually refuse to disclose which areas they serve (and don't serve) in fear that such information would help rival companies.

But as of December 2005, 19 ZIP codes in Illinois - all of them scattered throughout central and southern parts of the state -- had no broadband service provider at all, according to Illinois State University professor Dave Loomis, who cited data from the Federal Communications Commission.

An additional 954 ZIP codes had only one to three broadband providers, not enough "to induce competitive pricing," Loomis said in a Jan. 20 letter to Ray Williams, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

Ed Feser, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that ZIP code data might even give too bright a picture of internet availability, since some ZIP codes could have a broadband cable running through them, but the cable would be too far away from some homes and businesses within the ZIP code to provide service.

There's no question, however, that lack of broadband access is a significant problem for many rural areas, Feser said.

"The companies are naturally cherry-picking locations in order to install the services - places where they can capture the most revenue," Feser said. "It makes perfect sense for their economic bottom line, but leaves a fair number of people unserved."

Dial-up service has become increasingly inadequate as Web sites and Internet applications - particularly video - require unprecedented amounts of bandwidth.

By 2010, the Web traffic generated by only 20 homes will be equal to the information transmitted over the entire Internet in 1995, according to Cisco Systems.

"Over time, as business-to-business applications grow, and consumer-to-business applications grow, our (Internet) speeds will become more and more problematic," Feser said.

Satellite internet service offers faster speeds, but the needed satellite dish and equipment usually cost hundreds of dollars, and monthly subscriptions often cost twice as much as ground-based broadband.

Those prices are often too steep, said Rex Duncan, executive director of ConnectSI, an initiative seeking to help internet providers extend broadband access throughout southern Illinois.

"I'm not sure satellite right now is the most cost-effective way to provide broadband access," Duncan said.

Many rural Illinois advocates worry that areas of the country that don't have affordable high-speed Internet will lose jobs and people to cities that do.

"The economy in rural Illinois and rural America will be devastated if it doesn't have access to affordable, high-end broadband connections," said Carolyn Brown Hodge, director of rural affairs for Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn. "If certain parts of the country have access to these really robust networks that are capable of transmitting data at very high speeds and others are left behind, you can't compete."

Nora Feuquay, economic development coordinator for Macoupin County, said that without widespread access to a high-speed Internet network, it's difficult to lure new businesses.

Although many areas in Macoupin County have broadband access, Feuquay says some businesses may outsource their Internet-related jobs to cities where there's better service, she said.

"If we don't have the broadband ability that they need, that can sway them to stay in a more urban area," Feuquay said.

Lack of broadband access and the resulting paucity of tech jobs also leads many rural Illinois residents to move to urban areas, Hodge said.

"We have to offer people the tools they need to work, to play, to do all this stuff," she said. "People are going to say, 'I can't move there (to a rural area) if I don't have high-speed internet.'"

The population loss could even hurt downstate politically, Hodge said, since the region's representation in Congress is based on population.

"If (broadband) access isn't given," she said, "we'll lose another congresssional seat downstate (in 2010)."

Spokeswomen for Illinois' two largest telephone companies, AT&T and Verizon, say their companies understand the importance of extending broadband to rural areas and are continually trying to expand high-speed internet access.

Verizon offers DSL service to about 80 percent of its service area in Illinois, said spokeswoman Karen Boswell. In the last three months of 2006, she said, Verizon set up DSL service in about 20 new areas - mainly small towns in central and southern Illinois - and is planning to expand service to 28 more areas by this summer.

Last week, AT&T announced a goal of making high-speed broadband service available to every customer within its service area by the end of 2007.

About 85 percent of households would be offered ground-based DSL service, said AT&T spokeswoman Cara Birch. The other 15 percent will be offered broadband satellite internet through WildBlue, an internet satellite provider, she said.

Boswell compared the emergence of broadband internet networks to the introduction of telephone, electric and cable television networks in past decades.

"It came to your bigger population centers first, because you have to recover your investment," she said. "And over time it gradually spreads out."

But Birch said it simply isn't feasible to reach every community in Illinois.

"The only way to really do that is through satellite service, because there's just not enough (households), especially when you get into rural communities, where it would make enough sense to be able to just get all the way out to their home, just for them," she said.

Guy Sternberg remembers when, just a few years ago, everyone relied on dial-up internet service.

"It was OK when everyone else was on dialup as well," Sternberg said. "Nobody tried to send big files. Nobody had these zoomy new Web sites that have animations and so forth.

"Now that everybody else does, you're just sort of left behind," he continued. "It's like when you're 15 years old and you're all riding bicycles and all of a sudden all the other kids get cars, and you're still riding your bicycle.

"It's fine if you're all at the same speed, but when everyone else speeds up, if you want to keep up, you have to go with the program."

Jeremy Pelzer can be reached at (217) 782-3095 or at jeremy.pelzer@sj-r.com.

Internet options:

DSL:

Download Speed: 768 kbps - 6 mbps

Cost: $20-$45 per month

Available: Over telephone lines equipped to handle high-speed Internet traffic

Cable:

Download Speed: 3 - 10 mbps

Cost: $20-$73 per month

Available: Over cable television lines

Wireless:

Download Speed: 768 kbps - 1.5 mbps

Cost: $22-$80 per month

Available: In areas within range of a wireless Internet transmission tower

Dial-Up:

Download Speed: 16.8 - 56 kbps

Cost: about $25 per month

Available: Over virtually all telephone lines

Satellite:

Download Speed: 512 kbps - 1.5 mbps

Cost: $60-$70 per month

Available: Anywhere in the lower 48 states capable of receiving satellite transmissions

Speeds are measured in kilobits per second (kbps) and millions of bits per second (mbps). The Federal Communications Commission defines "broadband" as internet service with speeds of at least 200 kbps.

Sources: cybertelecom.org, Federal Communications Commission, wildblue.com, hughesnet.com

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