Day Two: Person County, N.C.

Jay Foushee was running late. A retired farmer in the county had chest pains, and Jay, a member of the volunteer fire department, was dispatched. He would have gotten home sooner, but he had trouble getting hold of the farmer’s wife.

“We were calling his wife and the phone was just ringing and ringing,” Jay says. “And then I thought, well hey, she might be on the Internet. Finally we called her sister who lives next door, who went over and got her.”

Their phone line was tied up because of the dial-up Internet connection? What year is it? For many in America, getting online via dial-up is a thing of the past, meaning Jay and his community are stuck there, too.

Phone and Cable Companies Have Stopped Short

And so it goes in rural Person County, where the retired farmer can see from his driveway the exact end of the cable lines, a lifeline to the outside world that is just beyond his grasp. Across the country and across North Carolina, telephone and cable companies have stopped short of bringing high-speed Internet to millions of rural families.

“I have called our local phone companies numerous times asking, ‘When can we get [high-speed Internet]?'” Jay says. “I keep getting, ‘Well, it's coming, it's coming.’ And this has been going on for about three years now.” Jay is a fourth-generation farmer who raises soybeans, corn and hogs on his 1,000 acres of land.

In Person County, population 37,341, 40 percent of the population does not have high-speed Internet, even as the county’s Web site claims the area “offers a strategic location for business and industry."

Jay’s neighbors have been organizing residents to appeal to the state government for help. One letter to state Rep. Bill Faison describes the ways their community is suffering on the wrong side of the digital divide, including:

• “Putting our children at a disadvantage in their education and ultimately their employment prospects;
• Creating more barriers to economic retooling of our agricultural community; and
• Suffering from income, class and mobility discrimination.”

This is the first time in 100 years the Foushees won’t be planting tobacco. Jay says his father feels the twinge of heartbreak in seeing this long-lived crop vanish from their fields; Jay, on the other hand, wants to move forward with the times.

The Education Divide

But Jay can only move so far when the technology isn’t moving with him. “We have dial-up; it takes forever,” Jay says. “Here at the farm, I might want to check markets. I might want to get on a Web site to look at a piece of equipment or order some parts or order vaccine for my hogs. But when you try to get to the Web site, you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the site to come up and it takes forever.”

Jay's 16-year-old daughter Julia has to take extreme measures to get online to do her homework, driving to her mother’s office – just recently outfitted with DSL – several nights a week.

“I watched her one night sit there and wait for page after page to come up, and it’s frustrating,” Jay says. “She could check it real quick instead of wondering or worrying or having to call somebody or take a bad grade because she didn’t have quick access to look up something.”

Julia demonstrates the family’s agonizingly slow connection with a click and a wait. And wait. Ten minutes after she logs in, she finally reaches her e-mail inbox, which brings news that elicits a groan. Someone has scheduled a last-minute online chat for her 4-H group, and now Julia has to trek out into the night to find a broadband connection so she can participate.

Julia’s mother Kim is understandably chagrined. “We want to be able to have her here at home where we could oversee what’s being looked at on the Web and to help her if she had any questions on something,” Kim says.

Kim is director of operations at the Orange County Speedway, where business just got a little easier with their DSL connection. But after work, Kim comes home to the slow lane.

“If anyone ever gets a taste of high-speed Internet versus dial-up, they’ll never want to go back,” Kim says. “It’s like driving a Corvette when you used to drive a Pinto.”