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Dr. Cecil Groves
President
Southwestern Community College |
Dr. Cecil Groves:
The Appalachian Access was a study, funded by the Appalachian
Regional Commission, the Rural Center, Advantage West, and several
others to study rural areas and see if something could happen here.
Was there sufficient demand to cause major investments by telephone
companies or others to restructure, if you will, and provide high-speed
bandwidth? The outcome of that study left several options but one
of the ones that came out of the findings was-one of the problems
was what we call backhaul. And that was the distance you had to
travel to reach a major point, if you will, a nexus point, I call
it an intercontinental highway of electronics that you had to pay
a toll going back and forth; it's called a middle mile in the telecommunications
field. If you can resolve that problem, bring that closer to home,
then you reduce costs and tremendously increase capacity. One of
the outcomes of Appalachian Access, Congressman Taylor took that
concept and with folks created a group called the Education-well,
it was a project of the Education Research Consortium, to build
a major national network access point. What's called a Tier 1 access
point, comparable to what you would find in Raleigh or Charlotte
or any major city. That was a huge initiative that he is responsible
for having created. And then, that becomes a point to which we can
tie into electronically. So that issue is much like again, a major
international airport being built in Asheville or the western region.
Then the process is to interconnect with that. And so out of Appalachian
Access also came an initiative called Balsam West Fiber Net, which
is an effort now to deal with the counties in the far western part
of the state. And that's the six counties who are most isolated
in the far western part and have the least access. And here it's
a public/private endeavor of both public institutions and private
entities to build a fiber connection back that we connect to the
Education Research Consortium. And that is actually it's operational
point is at NOAA, the National Weather Center, if you will, at Asheville
and the connect there, and use that service as a way to interconnect
to Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Berlin, Moscow, wherever you want
electronically
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