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Education needed on importance of broadband to rural areas Thursday, Feb 21, 2008 By Jason Wiest Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Enticing private companies to invest in extending expensive broadband Internet infrastructure into rural areas of the state may not require government incentives, but instead the education of Arkansans, industry officials said Wednesday. "The reason people don't have a demand for broadband primarily is because they don't understand what broadband can do for them," Arkansas Broadband Advisory Council Chairman James Winningham told members of a legislative committee on advanced communications and information technology. The council advises Gov. Mike Beebe and the Legislature on policy to make broadband accessible to every individual and organization across Arkansas. Rough estimates from industry groups show that 60 percent of Arkansans have broadband Internet access, while only 40 percent of that group is subscribing to it. "We need that percentage to move up," J.T. Meister, Windstream Corp.'s vice president of internal affairs, said. "That would create incentives for the companies, whatever technology it may be, but that creates the incentive for the private companies to deploy it further into the state." Incentives from the state might be necessary later on though, depending on the results of increasing awareness of the benefits of broadband, Meister said. The more limited the state's access to broadband, the wider the gap between Arkansas and the nation in education, healthcare, and living standards will grow, experts and elected officials said. Currently, Arkansas ranks 49th nationally in percentage of population online and 47th nationally in deployment of broadband telecommunications, according to the 2007 State New Economy Index. Arkansas ranks 23rd nationally in deployment of information technology in public schools. Private companies generally do not find it profitable to undergo the expensive process of extending broadband access to rural areas because few people are willing to pay for the service. Connect Arkansas, a nonprofit organization created by the Legislature last year, is charged with leading a collaborative effort between the private and public sectors to ensure the state has the infrastructure it needs to make broadband service available to every home and business across the state. The organization plans to map coverage areas across the state, first to determine where access is available, and then promote the benefits of broadband. A similar organization in Kentucky helped push private investment in broadband to $500 million in the first two years of its statewide broadband effort, according to Winningham. Full broadband deployment in Arkansas would create 8,200 new jobs and generate $21.8 million annually in additional state tax revenue and $2.6 billion annually in additional gross state product, according to the CSE Freedom Foundation. |
