There is some excitement here at the Snowbird Surf Club compound this week. Work crews have been on the property laying fiber optic cable for high-speed Internet as part of a new service to be provided by our local electric cooperative, French Broad Electric. Even though the service won’t start until the spring, we are all beyond thrilled.
The four households that make up our little
intentional community (soon to be six households) have subscribed to a local private
Internet provider since we moved here in 2015. At first, the service was great,
the owner lived in the county and was very responsive to any problems we might
have had with speed or outages. The service was confined to subscribers in a
limited area of the county, so there wasn’t a lot of demand on the bandwidth;
the speed was decent, even for streaming, and connectivity was great for work,
like loading this blog post.
Then rumors started to circulate that Federal grants
would become available to support expansion of broadband Internet to rural areas.
Of course, everyone wanted this, because the small provider we were with could
only handle so many households and go only so far into the county from his
base. Still, he felt he couldn’t compete with a government-subsidized
enterprise and took the opportunity to retire, selling out to a big-city
company in Asheville.
The problem for his customers was that the Asheville
company had lots of city customers sucking at the teat of their broadband
already. As they add more and more households here in Madison County, their
signal from Asheville gets weaker and weaker. From an average of about 13 mbps (megabytes
per second) when the sale happened, our signal is at an average of about 5 or 6
mbps now. We lost the ability to stream Disney Plus recently, HBO Max is wonky,
and I fear for Prime Video and Netflix soon. The loss of streaming capacity
isn’t just a minor inconvenience for me. I review films and television for a
weekly podcast. With COVID still a threat, I won’t expose myself to the crowds
in theaters; I need to be able to watch movies at home.
For the benefit of all involved, French Broad’s 25
mbps fiber optic Internet service can’t get here fast enough. Here at Snowbird,
we need it for work and for pleasure, but other households in this rural county
need it even more—to run businesses from home, to run their farms, to keep
their kids in school during COVID, to manage telehealth visits with distant
medical facilities, to keep in touch with families while we can’t travel.
Fortunately, the coop’s service is subsidized by a
state grant, which will be bolstered by $100 million to North Carolina from
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill that is earmarked for broadband
support. (Proving infrastructure is more than just roads and bridges, though
those are in dire need of funds, too, if the collapse of that bridge in
Pennsylvania is any example.) While the money flows, the expansion work goes
forward, with that goal of starting up the service in spring.
Which makes me even more ready for winter to be
over!
Cheers, Donna
