When businesses didn't bring high-speed Internet access to Ohio's small towns, The Ohio State University stepped in. With a few partners--including high-tech companies and the state--the university is getting small towns in Appalachian Ohio online.
Transcript
Voiceover:The emerging technologies group of Ohio State University and its partners have been working to connect Vinton Village in Gallia County, Ohio, to broadband networks. This project took place in spring of 2007 and is part of an ongoing project to connect rural towns in Appalachian Ohio to broadband networks.
The first community we did was New Straitsville, Ohio, followed by Chester Hill, Ohio, and then we just did Vinton this spring.
The most significant positive feedback that we’d like to attribute to our efforts is that every community we pick is picked based on the fact that they have no broadband existing, they only have dial-up.
In the first two communities, since completion of our projects, DSL has been offered by the commercial sector.
Each community project involves the deployment of a satellite-based wide-area network link and the build-out of a community-wide wireless town-area network.
This is coupled with the creation of a learning center and partners bringing educational content to the community.
One of the major goals of these projects is to bring distance education into the communities and further their educational opportunities, so we always partner with a local community college that has responsibility for the area. And in Vinton, it’s Rio Grande Community College, or Rio Grande University.
Vinton is going very well. I think it’s--we learn a little bit every time we do a project. I think this project stands to be the best of the three, so far.
The commercial sector doesn’t want to go into these small towns. It’s kind of like, there’s no business model there. There’s nobody going to buy it. They don’t have enough money to pay for our services, or they aren’t interested, or whatever. That might be a prevalent image out there but it turns out to be, quickly turns out to be not the case at all.
Project leadership comes from a team from the offices of the Chief Information Officer at OSU with sponsorship from OARNet and the American Distance Education Consortium.
Our partners in this project include the village of Vinton, Ohio State University Extension, Ohio Learning Network, the Governor’s Office of Appalachia, Gallia County Department of Jobs and Family Services, University of Rio Grande, Mindleaders, TechCorps Ohio, Vinton Elementary School, Gallia and Vinton County Educational Service Center, and Microsoft.
Not enough you see a mayor of a town climbing a water tower.
These days, the small water tower in rural Vinton, Ohio--population 324--helps deliver more than water.
Thanks to the Connecting Rural Ohio Wireless Neighborhood Project, a collaborative initiative bringing Internet connectivity to Appalachian communities, a stand of antennae bristling atop the water tank makes the Internet accessible to most Vinton homes.
For residents without a wireless modem at home, there's a community learning center in Town Hall, a former one-room schoolhouse from 1893. With six new Dell computers, a printer and a wireless network, this southern Ohio community can enter the information superhighway.
Up and running since April, the network has already brought change, in the form of online educational opportunities and e-commerce possibilities.
“We have unique skills and abilities to offer these communities, and it's been very rewarding work.”
—Ohio State research engineer Bob Dixon
Vinton is only the most recent beneficiary of the technology altruism of the CRO project, which unites partners like Ohio State's Office of the CIO, the Ohio Supercomputer Center and the Governor's Office of Appalachia in bringing broadband access to the region. The first community was New Straitsville, a village with fewer than 800 residents in southern Perry County, which received its wireless network in 2003. Next came Chesterhill, an enclave of 300 in Morgan County, which was brought online in 2006.
These communities--and many others in Ohio's 29 Appalachian counties--haven't fared so well in today's fast-paced, technology-driven world. Employment and education opportunities are limited, and in most of these hilly and out-of-the-way villages, there is no Internet connectivity to speak of. The CRO project aims to provide access to Web-based training and education, stabilize and stimulate the local economy and increase the community's standard of living.
"As a land-grant university, part of Ohio State's mission is outreach," said Bob Dixon, a research engineer who divides his time between the CIO's office and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. "We have unique skills and abilities to offer these communities, and it's been very rewarding work."
From an onCampus story by Julia Harris. Read the full story.
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