Getting on the Net

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: August 10, 2008

We don’t have debates in this country about the need for people living in rural communities or the inner cities to have electric service or a landline telephone. Everyone gets the same electric and telephone service, regardless of where they live.

But electricity and wired telephones are old technologies. The decisions to establish universal service for those two were made a long time ago. We don’t have to think about them, so we don’t think about them.

The same thing can’t be said for fast Internet connections. With the exception of pokey-old dial-up service that comes through on home telephone lines, customers have precious few competing choices. Often, what service you get — and how much you pay for it — is determined by where you live.

Some people live in areas that are served by the telephone company’s DSL service; others live in areas with cable television, so they’re able to receive their Internet over those wires. Select other places receive wireless services.

The bottom line, though, is that in the 15 years since the Internet exploded as a mass medium, consumer choices, quality and pricing vary wildly for those attempting to get online with anything faster than a basic — and slow — connection.

Time is supposed to fix that problem, but for now, too many communities live on the wrong side of the digital divide.

For people of a certain generation — the wired generation — a slow Internet connection is no longer acceptable. But the Internet service providers are caught in a predicament.

Not everyone wants an Internet connection in their homes and even among wired households, there are vastly different needs for bandwidth.

For example, a person who checks e-mail, surfs the Web and occasionally sends a picture of the kids to grandma doesn’t need the bandwidth that a person using the Internet for their telephone service or moving lots of large files for their business needs.

The federal government could eventually mandate that every household get the same type of connection to the Internet, just as there is universal electric or telephone service. But that’s not happening today, and even if it did, it might not fix the problems seen here in the Dan River Region for a long, long time.