Closing the gap
Utility co-ops see broadband service
as way to preserve rural communities
By Steve Thompson,
USDA Rural Development
t wasn’t so long ago
that telephone service
in rural areas usually
fell short of the standards city
dwellers expected. My grandmother,
who lived in a small Ohio farm
town, had a telephone with no dial
until the 1980s. To make a call, she
picked up the receiver and gave the
number she wanted to the operator.
Some subscribers still had party
lines: phone lines that were shared
between a number of houses, making
it possible for nosy neighbors to
listen in on phone conversations.
Today the scene has changed
dramatically. Most rural areas
have basic telephone service comparable
to that available in cities.
While many rural areas are still
struggling to gain access to Internet
services, others are further along than
cities in offering cutting-edge, broadband
telecommunications service.
That’s appropriate, rural telecommunications
advocates say, because
broadband communications give rural
areas access to many of the services
once confined to larger population
centers services that are becoming
more and more vital to the economic
health of America’s heartlands.
These services include better educational
opportunities and access to medical
specialists for people living in isolated
areas. It is becoming common for rural
students to take courses not available at
their local schools through electronic
linkups that create “virtual classrooms,”
where they are able to interact with
instructors and other students miles away.
Similarly, telemedicine technology
makes it possible for medical specialists
to examine and treat patients living in
remote locations. It’s all made possible
through the use of computers and
broadband communications links,
which many rural telephone co-ops are
aggressively promoting.
What is broadband?
The capacity of a line or interface to
carry information is referred to as
“bandwidth.” The wider the “band,”
the more information. Voice communications
over telephone lines take up little
bandwidth compared to that needed
to transmit television signals or for fast
computer links.
Broadband communications, using
more sophisticated transmission
hookups, make possible distance learning,
telemedicine and a vast range of
other computer-based services. In
effect, this technology makes it possible
to carry on many kinds of business
activities irrespective of location, offering
hope to many rural communities
hit hard by the recent vagaries of agricultural
markets.
Data on a beam of light
Telephone signals were first carried
by ordinary copper wire, which could
handle only a few dozen channels per
strand. Coaxial cable, which has a single
wire in the middle surrounded by a
woven wire sheath, came into widespread
use in the 1950s, and had a
capacity about a thousand times that of
simple wire.
Microwave radio links, using both
satellites and earth-bound chains of
transmission towers, offered even
more capacity although atmospheric
conditions can compromise their
effectiveness. However, the advent of
the computer age, as well as the rise
of the mobile phone, resulted in a
vastly expanded demand for bandwidth,
a demand that these conventional
transmission mediums were
hard-pressed to fill.
The answer was to transmit data
with light, using fiber optics. Because
laser light is made up of identical waves
of the same frequency, it can travel
long distances without scattering. It can
also be modulated, like a radio wave, to
carry information. A special glass,
developed in the 1970s, makes it possible
to transmit laser light through thin
filaments for up to 150 miles before it’s
necessary to amplify it. A thin bundle
of these filaments is capable of carrying
hundreds of times more data than a
coaxial cable.
By the late 1980s, fiber-optics cables
were being used increasingly for telephone
trunk lines, and cable television
companies used them to transmit programming
cross-country.
New Mexico co-op
boosts education
By 1990, the concept of distance
learning in which a teacher interacts
with students in other locations via
television was being tested by a few
pioneers. That’s when Dr. Robert Harris
learned about it. Dr. Harris was the
general manager of ENMR Plateau
telephone co-op, which serves part of
eastern New Mexico and several counties
in west Texas. Dr. Harris learned
about a distance learning project in
Arizona, and immediately decided that
a similar project could be useful to students
in ENMR Plateau’s service area.
Eastern New Mexico was ideally
suited for such an experiment. It is
beautiful, but very sparsely populated,
with a number of small, isolated communities.
Dr. Harris knew that there
were schools throughout the area that
had so few students it wasn’t possible to
bring them specialized education
courses such as foreign languages, differential
calculus, and other higher-level
subjects.
He quickly found a willing partner
in Clovis Community College in eastern
New Mexico. The president of the
college, Dr. David Caffey, was
intrigued by the idea, and very quickly
an agreement was drawn up for a 5-
year pilot program under which the
college would provide remote classroom
instruction through a fiber-optics
two-way television link.
Drs. Harris and Caffey first discussed
the project in the fall of 1990.
Only a few short months later, in time
for the spring semester of 1991, the
pilot program was up and running with
49 small-town students. The college
obtained funding under the “E-Rate”
program, a Federal Communications
Commission effort that taxes long-distance
telecommunications companies
and makes the funds available to defray
the cost of telecommunications services
in schools and libraries.
ENMR granted the college an easement for the use of the fiber-optics
link, and two-way television systems
were set up in 12 small school districts.
The first video set-up was expensive
and clumsy, using direct fiber-optics
links with the switching equipment in
ENMR’s main office in Clovis. The
system made huge demands on bandwidth,
and links had to be manually
switched at the headquarters.
Today, the use of new digital technology
is making it possible for the project
to bring distance-learning to nearly
a thousand students using less than 1
percent of the original bandwidth.
Computer software is now taking care
of switching, allowing the college to
take over all administration of the distance-learning program; the co-op now
merely provides the infrastructure.
Expanded curriculum
As the program has matured, the
curriculum has expanded, and recent
state legislation has made it possible for
students taking some advanced courses
to earn college credits concurrently
with their high school credits. The system
is also used after hours by adults
taking college-credit courses and by the
New Mexico Department of Labor for
outreach to unemployed workers.
The carrying capacity freed up by
more efficient technology is used for
upgraded telecom service to individual
and business subscribers, including
high-speed Internet service over DSL
lines (see sidebar).
The fiber-optic lines, which were
originally meant to serve only schools,
are ideally situated for serving the coop’s
rural subscribers, most of whom live
near the participating schools or close to
the fiber-optics lines. Because the signal
degrades over distance, DSL is impractical
more than three miles away from
the exchange or a fiber optic terminal.
USDA helps Kansas co-op
with distance learning project
Another co-op distance-learning
pioneer is Rural Telephone Service Co.
Inc., located in northwestern Kansas.
Rural Telephone was one of the first
companies to bring fiber optics into
rural service, laying several routes in
1988 with financial help from what was
then the Rural Electrification Administration
(REA), now USDA Rural Utilities
Service.
“It was obvious to us in the mid-
1980s that if we wanted to build for the
future, fiber optics were the way to go,”
says Larry Sevier, general manager of
the co-op.
A distance learning program soon followed.
Today, 13 high schools, Colby
Community College and Hays State University
participate in the program, bringing
advanced and specialized curricula to
rural Kansas students. A grant from the
Rural Utilities Service’s Distance Learning
Program is being used to expand the
two-way interactive television network
and add classrooms to the system.
More recently, Rural Telephone,
with the help of RUS, is helping make
it possible for Phillips County Hospital,
located in the town of Phillipsburg,
Kan., to offer improved medical services
all over the county an especially
important service for a community
with a widely scattered population.
The project came about after the
non-profit organization that operates
the hospital, Great Plains Health
Alliance, embarked on an effort to connect
member clinics and hospitals on a
common data network. With the help
of the Economic Development
office of Rural Telephone,
Great Plains, which is headquartered
in Wichita, Kan.,
decided to build its pilot project
in Phillips County.
The healthcare organization
was able to form a consortium
of health care facilities, including
clinics and a retirement
home, which received an RUS
telemedicine grant of $247,000.
The money is being used to
install computers in each
department of the hospital and
in participating clinics and
nursing homes. In addition, new fiber
optic lines are being laid between nursing
homes and nearby hospitals in
Phillipsburg and Logan, another town
in Phillips County.
For now, telemedicine cameras and
monitors will be installed only in Phillips
County Hospital’s education department
and one clinic but data-sharing capabilities
will mean a boost in efficiency for
all the participating facilities. The eventual
goal is a broadband network providing
data-sharing and telemedicine capabilities
to participating healthcare
providers across several states.
Jim Wahlmiere, the administrator of
Phillips County Hospital, is looking
forward to completing the pilot project
by the end of this year. “I want to thank
Rural Telephone for all their help on
this, especially for their assistance in
getting the USDA/RUS grant,” he says.
Rural Telephone has used its fiberoptics
lines to make DSL hookups
available to more than 80 percent of
its subscribers. And its willingness to
offer state-of-the-art telecom service
has helped it compete for subscribers
in Norton and Almena, towns served
by giant Southwestern Bell, where
the co-op serves 95 percent of the
market.
Sevier has one regret about being a
fiber-optic pioneer. When the co-op’s
first fiber-optics lines were installed,
nobody had any idea how great and
how quickly demand for service would
grow. Some of the cables have been
augmented, and advances in electronics
have made it possible for the existing
lines to carry more traffic. But Sevier
says he would lay larger-capacity cables
to begin with if he had it to do again.
Unlimited possibilities
for rural America
Both ENMR Plateau in New Mexico
and Rural Telephone in Kansas see the
availability of high-speed Internet access
as crucial to the future economic health
of their service areas. The quality of education
that distance learning makes possible
for small school districts as well as
the higher standards of medical care
offered by telemedicine encourage
families to remain in rural areas instead
of moving to more urbanized locations.
And high-speed Internet, teleconferencing
and related services using broadband
communications to make it possible
for businesses in rural areas to
compete in the national and world
economies in ways formerly not possible.
Broadband makes it possible for
companies that rely heavily on telephone
or Internet ordering to offer
employment to under-employed labor
pools in rural areas. It also facilitates
telecommuting working from a location
remote from the office or other
place of business making it possible
for many people to work at jobs anywhere
in the country, without moving
away from home.
Neither co-op thinks that the possibilities
of high-speed data transmission
have even come close to being fully
realized. In the future, broadband communications
may offer rural areas
across America the ability to develop
new alternatives to reliance on farm
income and erase the economic gap
between town and country once and
for all.
