SPINDALE, N.C. (WNCW) - Granite, steep roads, and thin populations are among the reasons thousands of homes in Western North Carolina still lack reliable high-speed internet, according to state officials and broadband experts interviewed by WNCW for a new four-part series.
"Still Waiting: The Push to Get Western North Carolina Online" is a More to the Story series that follows the work to connect people across the region. Part 1, "The Last Mile," airs Friday, Oct. 30, at 7:51 a.m. during Morning Edition on WNCW 88.7 FM. It also streams at wncw.org. New parts air each Friday through Nov. 20.
The series features Angie Bailey, director of the Broadband Infrastructure Office at the N.C. Department of Information Technology; Dave Kaiser, senior director of policy advocacy and innovation at the N.C. Rural Center; Sarah Thompson, vice president of economic opportunity and strategic initiatives at Dogwood Health Trust; and Brian Rathbone, a broadband consultant and former state broadband office staffer.
WHAT "BROADBAND" MEANS
Bailey said broadband has become shorthand for any type of high-speed internet. "It's high enough internet connectivity to do all the things you need to do in a day: telework, homework, e-learning, social connections," she said.
The pandemic made the stakes clear, she said, when people were suddenly at home without access. "Being home during that time period really made the country realize how important this infrastructure is, and it's really changed the whole game," Bailey said.
North Carolina has the second-largest rural population in the country. Bailey said state and federal leaders have committed what she called an "unprecedented amount of funding" to broadband, and that projects now underway are expected to wrap up construction within the next nine months.
THE LAST MILE
Reaching the final homes is the hardest part, Kaiser said. The N.C. Rural Center works with 33 counties on broadband.
"The more rural a county or region, the less dense the population, or the further away a family or business is from a more centralized urban area, the harder they are to connect," Kaiser said. He said the problem is not limited to one county or region. "It's connecting those businesses and homes that are at that last mile stretch that is the hardest to connect."
In the mountains, the ground itself is part of the problem. Bailey said every county is different, but rock is a constant in the west. "If you have to bury the fiber and you're going into rock, granite specifically out west, that gets very expensive," she said. Crews sometimes have to blast, or try to go around the rock, which is not always possible with mountains in the way.
Roads add to the cost. "In general, the more remote a location is, the more expensive it may be to reach, because you've got less options to get there," Bailey said.
Rathbone, who worked in the state broadband office in the early 2010s and now consults on projects across the country, pointed to Interstate 40 near the Tennessee line as an example. He said that one stretch of road would likely cost more than upgrading 40 miles of Highway 221.
THE MATH
Rathbone said building internet in rural areas comes down to arithmetic. He said it costs about $50,000 a mile on average to put fiber on utility poles, and about $15 a foot to run a line up a driveway.
"If I know you're a thousand feet off the road, and I know that there's only three households per mile, if it's fifty thousand dollars and there's three households per mile, it doesn't take long to do the math," he said.
Thompson said that is why rural areas wait. "The cost of putting fiber in the ground, it's very difficult to recoup that cost when you've got two houses per mile," she said. "That's why rural America is the last place to get broadband."
Federal subsidy programs exist largely to push private companies to build where there is no business case without help, Thompson said.
Rathbone said the tipping point comes at about 15 locations per linear mile of road. Below that, he said, "the numbers go upside down." He said the providers that have made it work in those areas are telephone cooperatives and nonprofits, which can wait longer to earn their money back. "They can stretch it out with patient capital," he said.
Large, publicly traded companies face a different pressure, Rathbone said. "Any company that's publicly traded has an obligation to their shareholders not to lose money," he said. He added that he realized his own retirement account was part of the pressure, because it invests in companies on his behalf without his direction.
Rathbone said he once asked a large carrier to extend service to Golden Valley in Rutherford County. "They just looked at me and said, the numbers don't work. We're not coming," he said. "That's when I realized the only lever we have is the economics."
WHO IS HIT HARDEST
The people most affected are often those with the fewest options, Thompson said. Low-income areas tend to adopt internet service more slowly because of cost, she said. Other groups facing barriers include rural residents, older adults and people whose primary language is not English.
"A lot of the populations that face these barriers are populations that we have in Western North Carolina," Thompson said.
Kaiser said each county has its own version of the story. "If you've seen one North Carolina county, you've seen one North Carolina county," he said. "And they're serving all one hundred of them."
WHAT'S NEXT
In Part 2, "Maps and Money," airing Nov. 6, WNCW looks at who decides which homes count as connected and where billions of dollars in public money are going. Part 3, "Fiber, Satellite and the Copper Question," airs Nov. 13, and Part 4, "Beyond the Wire," airs Nov. 20.
WNCW contacted several of the major internet providers that serve the region. Some responded, but none agreed to an interview or provided a statement for this series.
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TAGS: Still Waiting, More to the Story, rural broadband, high-speed internet, Western North Carolina, N.C. Rural Center, Dogwood Health Trust, NCDIT Broadband Infrastructure Office, fiber, WNCW
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