Day Five: Rutherford County, N.C.
“Moving out here was digital culture shock in a way. I assumed wrongly that I would at least be able to get cable out to the house, or DSL. As it turned out, neither of those are even close to where we live." (Watch the Interview)
Rutherford County’s first textile plant opened in 1874 but burned to the ground only a few months later. It could have been taken as a foreboding sign of what was to come, how the textile industry would momentarily boost an economy, and then be wiped out almost completely.
In the 1990s, when the textile industry skipped town to countries like Taiwan and Korea, Rutherford County was left to sift through the rubble, and its economy would never be the same again.
“The recession everyone is talking about now started more than a decade ago here,” says Tim Will, executive director of Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center. Foothills is one of seven “telecenters” created by North Carolina's e-NC Authority to serve as technology and entrepreneurship resource centers for rural, economically distressed counties.
No Broadband = No Development
From 1996 to 2006, more than 150,000 jobs vanished from North Carolina's textile industry, and the current state of the economy hasn’t made life any easier. In Rutherford County, population nearly 63,000, people are barely hanging on.
“Two churches and a town have approached me to say that the food bank has run out of food, if that’s any indication of how bad it is here,” Tim says.
Tim believes the key to turning things around is high-speed Internet. “If you don’t have broadband, you don’t get economic development,” he says. “If you don’t have access to broadband, no company is going to move into your area because they’re going to demand broadband.”
Harnessing opportunities from broadband – the ability to start home businesses, telecommute, and get an online education – will reinvigorate the local economy, Tim says.
Despite its isolation, Rutherford County is only 50 miles from Asheville, the largest city in Western North Carolina. “So we are within proximity to a huge market, but to connect to that market we need communication, i.e., the Internet. If we don’t have access to the Internet, all of those customers do not know we are here and we can’t conduct Internet commerce.”
Can't Settle for Less
When Sam Adams relocated to Rutherford County from Raleigh with his wife to care for ailing family members, he could barely do his telecommuting job. Sam is a senior IBM researcher who can’t settle for anything less than broadband.
“Moving out here was digital culture shock in a way,” Sam says. “I assumed wrongly that I would at least be able to get cable out to the house, or DSL. As it turned out, neither of those are even close to where we live, and even our regular phone line, when it rains out here and the ground gets good and wet, our phones crackle and sometimes go out.”
At first, he tried to use a wireless data card, but that proved insufficient. “It got to be a real barrier when you’re on the phone with some senior VP up in New York somewhere and he says, ‘Why don’t you send me your charts?’ ” he says. “And I say, ‘Well, it’s 20 megabytes and given my little data card, it will take about an hour-and-a-half.’ And he’s on the phone going, ‘I want it now.’ That was a real problem.”
But Sam didn't want to return to the big city. “The quality of life here is just unmatched,” Sam says. “So the question was, how do I continue with my job, continue to do what I know how to do to make money, and live where I want to live?”
Locked Out
After settling for mediocre satellite service for two years, Sam eventually made a bold – and expensive – move, erecting his own wireless tower “to bounce a signal off a nearby mountain that’s given me reasonable broadband.”
His solution cost nearly $10,000, an expense that most people can’t shoulder. Sam says his experience has given him a unique perspective on the digital divide. “What about the millions of Americans who are still stuck on dial-up?” he says. “They are just really locked out.”
“How are you going to attract a business to the area when you say, 'The best you’re going to get is medium-quality cable type access?' ” he asks. “And, ‘Oh yeah, everyone you bring here for your factory or your corporation, they’re all going to be severely downgraded for their digital access.' That’s just a non-starter.
"If innovation is about competing and getting to the market, whether that’s the marketplace of ideas, or ideology or economy, the slower you move, the worse you’re off."
