The right questions

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: August 11, 2008

What if someone were to come to Danville to build a new fiber-optic broadband network that competing Internet service providers could to offer everyone the Internet speed and capacity they want?

Danville hopes to do just that by building an “open access network” in its electric service areas. The city would be the Internet wholesaler to the ISPs, which would sell retail use on the new network to local customers.

“We’re going right to the home,” said Assistant City Manager for Utilities Joe King. “We hope, in the years to come, to have several providers.”

Danville’s existing broadband network connects the regional fiber networks to government buildings, schools and a handful of business customers. For the city, the next logical step is to build consistent service to the rest of the region’s neighborhoods.

To do that, nDanville is asking local residents to take a quick survey at http://www.ndanville.net to gauge local interest in residential broadband.

The survey will likely find islands of interest in residential broadband. Your neighbor may not even own a computer, a person down the street may want to use a Net-based phone service like Vonage and you may want to watch videos on http://www.foxnews.com without today’s inconsistent playback. The survey hopes to answer the question of local residents’ “interest and willingness to buy products,” King said

When his own sons lived at home, King’s family needed today’s relatively fast cable modems. Now with them gone, a DSL connection is all he needs.

In a better world, we would all have the same chance to get the same kind of Internet access — no matter where we lived. That’s not what we have today. But taking nDanville’s residential broadband survey is one way to help point the Dan River Region in that direction.