On occasion I like to brag about the little town of Carrboro where I live. Residents fondly refer to it as the Paris of the Piedmont, and c’est vrai – it is a great little place to live. One amenity I particularly enjoy is being able to grab breakfast or lunch at Weaver Street Market and tap into the Town of Carrboro wireless network (tocwireless).

Well, it now looks like the folks over in the nearby town of Wilson have done us one better, and you have to wonder if their efforts are a harbinger of things to come: They’ve now got their own fiber-optic-based Internet, television and phone service called Greenlight. Basically, they are treating the Internet like an essential utility, and finding that local providers like Time Warner Cable and Embarq weren’t willing to meet their needs, they’ve taken things into their own hands.

I picked up this bit of information while engaging in another of my favorite activities over at Weaver Street – reading the Independent Weekly – and I must admit that the news of Wilson’s efforts brought me an almost irrational sense of pleasure. You see, I have suffered directly at the hands of Time Warner Cable’s unbelievably abysmal customer service, as I know others (including its own technicians) have suffered at the hands of Comcast, and I relish the thought of communities breaking the stranglehold companies like these have on broadband in the United States.

I don’t begrudge companies charging to provide Internet service – and Wilson does charge competitive rates for its Greenlight service – the problem is that most of them have done such a lousy job keeping up with customer needs and the general potential that high bandwidth offers. And very often they offer little or no service in rural areas. Wilson and a growing group of other communities – more than 60 across the country, according to a recent study – feel they can do better.

Slowly, people are coming to realize that this is a serious issue. As the Independent puts it,

The importance of highly efficient Internet service is more than a matter of better e-mail access or the ability to work from home. A lack of fast, widely available networks limits communities’ abilities to manage basic utilities like water and sewer service, to respond to emergencies, and to deliver medical care.

From the standpoint of Mission to Learn, I’ll point out that reliable, high speed access to the Internet is also increasingly important to education, both formal and informal.

So far, the horse-trading over who controls Internet access has tended to play out in the background and in back rooms – usually to the detriment of consumers. “Increasing deregulation of the telecommunications industry, the Independent suggests, “has helped prop up monopolies—without requiring the companies that deliver most of the nation’s Internet service to invest in the infrastructure that would allow broadband speed to increase, or costs to decrease.”

I am perhaps being a bit too optimistic too early, but I hope efforts like the one in the town of Wilson represent a move towards much higher visibility for the issue, and better solutions.

How is this issue playing out in your community? Please comment and share your story. And if you live outside the United States, it would be great to have your input. How is access to broadband shaping up in your country and community?

JTC

P.S. I highly recommend reading the entire Indy article and viewing the accompanying slide show. And if you would like a taste of the flavor of Carrboro, check out It’s Carrboro.

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