Waiting for Broadband, Pt. III

Community Through Connectivity

By Richard Martin, 7-08-05

	If they won't come, we will build it.

The last time I wrote about the effort to bring high-speed Internet service to Four-Mile Canyon, where I live, I got a response from Katrina Harms, a member of the Magnolia Road Internet Cooperative. One of the largest of such providers in the state of Colorado, the co-op has been providing service to the mountainsides and canyons along Magnolia Road, above Boulder, for three years now, and it’s one of the real success stories of the community-based movement to bring true broadband to rural areas where the commercial service providers have failed, or declined, to penetrate.

Greg Ching, a founder and board member of the Magnolia co-op, is a perfect example of the type of new-economy “knowledge-worker� that places like Boulder want to attract (and should want to serve). He worked in sales for Sun Microsystems for 12 years, helped create the co-op in 2001-02, at the depths of the telecom crash, and ended up finding his new job, with Terma Software Labs, through a neighbor and fellow co-op member.

“From the start, our slogan has been ‘Fostering community through connectivity,’� Ching says. “We do a lot of things that a commercial ISP just couldn’t do – like providing free high-speed wireless service to volunteer firefighters.�

Having started in 2002 with about two dozen hardy pioneers, each of whom made an interest-free loan of $300 to help build the infrastructure, the co-op now has 350 subscribers and a backlog of 100 households waiting on new service. Covering some 250 square miles total, the network has four high-speed T-1 lines feeding 14 points-of-presence, which means that it’s highly unlikely that a blizzard or lightning storm could interrupt service. (During the famous blizzard of March 2003, in fact, the Magnolia Road network stayed up when most of the mountain neighborhoods around Boulder were completely cut off.)

“We're regularly asked to give advice from communities as local as Evergreen to as far away as Afghanistan,� Ching adds. “We have been approached by the State of Colorado's IT Department interested in understanding how to replicate our success in other rural areas.�

It’s a travesty that people like the Magnolia residents have to join together to provide themselves with high-speed Internet connections – if ever there were a service that government could provide that would foster rural communities, promote economic development, and increase safety in isolated areas, it’s broadband. In fact, Congress is now engaged in a debate, fueled by two conflicting bills, over whether communities can be prevented from providing high-speed Internet service to citizens if commercial providers want to keep the opportunity to themselves – even if no commercial offering is currently available.

Westerners, though, have a long tradition of fending for themselves and creating communities in the face of odds, distance, and rough terrain. The Magnolia Road co-op continues that tradition.

A new co-op for Gold Hill, at the top of Four-Mile Canyon, has recently formed and is getting consulting help from the Magnolia group.

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