In rural Ford County, a contractor buries fiber-optic cable next to a field for Ideatek, a local broadband company based in the town of Buhler. Ideatek has used fiber lines like this one to bring high-speed internet to several towns with populations of just a few hundred people in southwest Kansas. Photo courtesy Ideatek
By DAVID CONDOS
Kansas News Service
With a family of five and a farming operation to run, Clay Scott’s home internet didn’t come close to cutting it.
Pulling
up a weather page in a browser could take so long it produced an error
message rather than a forecast. He tried installing a wireless security
system, but it sucked up so much bandwidth that nothing else in the
house would work. Once when his son needed to email a school project,
the rest of the family had to log off just to give their connection
enough capacity to send it.
“Today, we really expect it to be: Snap your fingers, here you go,” Scott said. “So it was definitely a challenge.”
Like
many rural Americans, Scott’s home in southwest Kansas connected to the
internet over an old copper wire. A better-than-nothing update on
century-old telephone technology that struggles to handle Zoom calling,
video streaming or a myriad of other internet uses that people in big
cities largely take for granted.
Federal and state governments have poured billions
into trying to bring more bandwidth to the remote corners of the
country. But for many people in rural places, it hasn’t made any
difference. An estimated 42 million Americans still don’t have high-speed internet, or what most people today simply think of as internet.
With
fiber-optic cable installation costing tens of thousands of dollars per
mile, it’s unlikely that big national providers will ever find a way to
make money — or even avoid losses — by hooking up people like Scott in
rural Kansas.
An Ideatek fixed wireless tower stands next to a road in Chase County just west of Elmdale. Towers like this send out a wireless signal that can connect any home within the line of sight and link farm equipment to the internet for precision agriculture applications. Ideatek
But a growing number of small towns, farms and ranches are finally
joining the Digital Age with help from small, local companies that have
more of a stake in the rural areas they call home. They’ve found ways to
stretch state and federal subsidies to strategically install
high-capacity wires to homes, or construct over-the-air relays, to bring
more robust speeds to remote outposts, town-by-town,
farmstead-by-farmstead.
Now, with $42 billion
in new federal broadband …….
Source: https://salinapost.com/posts/30768f34-3f00-4adf-ae5a-06e11434f841