Charlotte summit today will discuss how N.C. have-nots lack needed broadband.
By Eric Frazier
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When Pete Pruitt asked Comcast Cable how much it would cost to get high-speed internet service at his Caswell County home, officials told him they’d need to run fiber lines to his street, a mile-long artery that 12 families call home.
Cost: a one-time fee of $48,000.
He didn’t take them up on that offer.
“I understand why they won’t do it” for free, said Pruitt, an insurance agent. “I wouldn’t pay $48,000 for 12 customers.”
State officials say at a time when much of life and work is migrating online, far too many North Carolinians share his problem. They call it today’s version of the digital divide – the broadband haves and have-nots.
The problem is the focus of a conference at Johnson C. Smith University today that’s expected to draw telecommunications executives, community activists, politicians and the White House’s chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra.
Virtually everyone in the state can access the internet in some form today, be it at home, at work, on a mobile phone, at school or at the local library. But high-speed broadband has become critical for tasks like telecommuting and taking college classes online, and poor people and those in rural areas have lower access rates.
“There’s a serious broadband digital divide in North Carolina and it’s actually getting worse as most of the Internet world moves to apps that require broadband,” said Wally Bowen, head of the Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN), a nonprofit that runs a fiber-optic network in the Asheville area.
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- Satellite broadband touted as digital divide clincher (v3.co.uk)
