Mountain State Matters

Access to high-speed internet isn’t an issue that comes up very often in highly-populated suburban and urban centers, but is much more of a problem for those in rural areas. In a bill that was authored in February and signed earlier this month, Governor Manchin said that bringing broadband internet to every crevice of the state by 2010 was a primary goal for the state and the legislature. Can this happen in two short years?

Internet has become a huge part of our culture, and I, for one, consider it as my main form of information, responsible for most of my contact with the rest of the country and the world. But look at that map to the left created by Connect West Virginia (click on it to make it bigger). Most of West Virginia is white on that map, meaning that there is no high-speed Internet access. Granted, some of the white areas are likely mountains that aren’t heavily populated, but most of the state’s population is rural.

If the whole state has Internet access by 2010, the governor needs to make sure that the service is useful to the majority of the state. The bill is to be commended for specifically focusing on providing “outreach and education in underserved areas,” but that’s likely not enough because without computers, the Internet will be useless. Now, outreach and access combined with frequent public computer labs would be useful, and would play a large part in education and job skills throughout the state.