Rural Internet access so '90s

High-speed Internet service is pretty much a given these days.

Unless, that is, you live somewhere other than a city.

Take the case of Connie Hammond and her daughter, Emily, who live in the countryside east of Decatur, within sight of the Ohio line.

The Hammonds still plod along with 56k dial-up Internet service, though the service really operates about 40k, Emily Hammond says.

Why, they ask, can’t they get affordable high-speed service?

They’ve certainly tried. High speed is available in Decatur, just six miles from their home, but that’s about two miles too far away for them to get DSL, which is high-speed service over copper ground lines.

They can’t get wireless service, even though there is a tower not too far from their home. The problem is that there are forests between the towers and the Hammonds’ home, which sits in a low spot, so the signal doesn’t reach them.

Fiber optic is available to 73 percent of the people in the state, according to a Verizon spokesman, but the Hammonds are among the 27 percent who don’t get it.

There is high-speed satellite service available, but that costs a bundle, more than $100 a month with taxes, which is too much for the Hammonds to pay.

They did contact one service provider that looked promising, only to be told they would help them only if they could find someone living nearby who also had the service. If they did that, then they would include them in the loop.

So the Hammonds plod along with the kind of technology that was in use when the Internet was in its infancy and a computer with 16 megs of RAM was a hot machine.

But the rest of their lives aren’t stuck in 1996, they say. Computers have become a more vital part of people’s lives than they realize. Connie Hammond is taking courses at Ivy Tech Community College toward a nursing degree, and Emily is studying communications at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. They aren’t taking distance-learning classes, in which everything is done over the computer. But much of their work has to be done on the Internet.

Emily, for example, is taking one class in which the midterm and all weekly quizzes have to be done on the Internet. She attends school two days a week and works the five others. That means that on days she has classes she either has to stay at school until she has finished all her work, or find a way to get to the Decatur library on her lunch hour and take advantage of its wireless Internet connection. Lunch is about the only time Emily can make it to the library because her work schedule usually overlaps with the library’s hours.

Connie Hammond, meanwhile, has to go to the library to do her homework and do research for papers, but she’s limited to one hour on a computer.

At home, doing homework or researching papers is virtually impossible. It can take a half-hour to load a Web site, Connie says, and then she’ll get kicked off the site after about five minutes.

Much of her homework also has to be done online. It might take 10 minutes to load a page that contains one question as part of a quiz. If the quiz has 20 questions, that’s more than three hours spent waiting for questions to load, and that doesn’t even include the time spent answering the questions.

Dial-up, Emily Hammond says, is a joke.

Which raises a question. Distance learning is becoming more and more popular. Ivy Tech, for example, offers 70 courses strictly online in the region and has 906 students enrolled in those courses. It has 96 students enrolled in five courses that are hybrids, with some classroom instruction and some done online. Two courses involved two-way video.

Ivy Tech officials acknowledge that anyone without a high-speed Internet connection is definitely at a disadvantage. In fact, students are told up front how much technology is included in courses, and students are discouraged from taking courses online if they don’t have high-speed service at home. The school has no figures on how many students choose not to take courses because of lack of Internet service, said Russ Baker, the academic dean of Ivy Tech in Fort Wayne. The director of distance education has told him, though, anecdotally that students are periodically discouraged from signing up for courses because they don’t have adequate computer service.

One wonders, though, how many Hoosiers are left out of the loop. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission tried to get a handle on that in a recent study, with limited success. Many cable and Internet providers refused to provide data. The state has determined, though, that though Indiana has lots of high-speed lines, it has fewer broadband lines per 100 people than the national average. It found that 1 percent of ZIP codes in the state have no broadband service at all. That sounds pretty good, but just because a ZIP code has broadband doesn’t mean that everyone gets it. The ZIP code 46733 – that’s Decatur – has high-speed access, but not the Hammonds.

So in an age when the state urges you to renew licenses online, and the IRS urges people to e-file and eBay has become the new garage sale, how many people in rural areas are left out?

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