Gathering to explore ‘digital divide’

Charlotte summit today will discuss how N.C. have-nots lack needed broadband.

By Eric Frazier
[email protected]

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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About Mark Milliman

Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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