Source: Kansas City Star (Original Article)
BUHLER, Kan. | Not long ago, Gregory Inc. felt in danger of being too remote, too rural, for the digital age.
The graphics printing firm’s Internet connection cost too much and pumped data too slowly, threatening the company’s ability to get a design for a truck-sized decal on Monday afternoon and promise delivery on Tuesday morning.
In stepped local Internet provider IdeaTek with a fiber-optic line. Suddenly Gregory rocketed from a barely adequate cyber connection to a speed-of-light pipeline.
“It allows us to operate as if we’re just down the street from you no matter where you are,” said Gary Wolfer, the company’s director of technical services.
Such is the power of bringing high-speed Internet to rural America — a difference that can dramatically level the playing field between city and countryside, that can deliver specialized medicine to places that can’t recruit medical specialists, that can open university instruction to people who can’t come to a campus.
The Obama administration so values broadband that it’s spending $7.2 billion in economic stimulus funds to wire rural America. The move casts a virtual lifeline to the country’s most remote residents, even as it poses a question of how far government must go to help rural areas keep pace. Or whether government even needs to.
Consider what got Buhler, near Hutchinson, wired. It was not government subsidies.
It was the market.
“It’s just a business case,” said Daniel Friesen, the president of IdeaTek. His firm offers everyone in town a package that gives them phone service, 120 TV channels and Internet speeds that would leave a Road Runner in the dust for $100 a month. “We can do it without a subsidy in these concentrations of people — but you need those concentrations.”
His firm has been swallowing cheap flights Devonport to Hobart customers from the local cable television company …continue reading
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