Closing the gap: utility co-ops see broadband service as way to preserve rural communities

Rural Cooperatives, July-August, 2002 by Steve Thompson

It 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.