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County residents need access to high-speed Internet
To the editor:
In the Tuesday Oct. 16 edition of the Courier News, a representative of Ritter Communications touts the technological advantages of the area and stated that the businesses of the area have the same access to high-speed Internet as the larger cities. While this may be true for most businesses, for the residents, this is a different story in my opinion.
If you go on the west side of town, the side that has Walmart, the factories and the steel mill, there is high-speed Internet, but you go 15 miles outside of Blytheville along Highway 239, and you enter an area where the only high-speed Internet solutions are dial-up (which is slow and cheap) or satellite Internet (which is fast and expensive and limited in what it can do by weather). While it is always a good idea to give businesses access to these services, it is just as important to give people access to these services.
Just recently I learned that Dell still does not have access to cable Internet (I am unsure about wireless Internet). Ladies and gentlemen of Blytheville, if we are ever to get back on our feet and show the country that this town is a modern town, then this is a situation that needs to be fixed. This town is more than the businesses and factories, it is people who need a high-speed Internet connection to do many things on the Internet today. Today many things are done over the Internet from banking, to shopping to watching movies and even TV shows. You go to Walmart or Sears, you will find Blu-ray players and flat-screen TVs with many programs built into them that allow you to download and watch movies over the Internet, but in order to do so, you need a HIGH-SPEED connection. The Internet is also not just how we got our movies and shop for whatever, it is also there to help our kids do homework and to learn and connect to the world.
Today, the world is more connected than ever before. If you want proof of this fact, look to what happened during the Arab Spring, which was born from Internet postings on Facebook and Twitter that have not only led to the changing of governments in many countries but to at least one civil war. How many times have we on the street said something about Facebook or Twitter to our friends and neighbors? The Internet is no longer just a tool to view information -- it is a tool by which we not only connect to the world without filter, but a tool by which many people manage some important aspects of their lives. However, if you have a slow Internet, these actions take a long time to accomplish. On a 26.4 Internet I currently have it takes me 30 minutes to download a 1:00 video from YouTube or any other site, but if I had access to high-speed Internet, the time would be 30 seconds, and on larger videos, the time to currently download anything over 20 minutes is 7 to 8 hours, while on a high-speed connection the time is only 5 minutes.
So what do we do about this? First off, Ritter, AT&T, Verizon, and the other high-speed Internet companies need to cater to the people as much as to businesses. At local offices, when someone asks about whether or not they are coming to their area, have them keep an note of this so when they extend to an area they will know where to go. Request boxes need to be placed both in the local stores and on their Internet pages so people can put their addresses in them and the companies can know where the most need is. Recently, AT&T started construction on a new cell tower that will increase wireless Internet to the area. This is one step in the right direction, but only one. Ritter needs to extend Internet to Dell and some of the surrounding areas, so that if you live near Blytheville then you have the same choices as those who live in Blytheville. Also, our local government needs to get involved. They need to understand that Internet is a vital importance to this economy and need to work with these Internet companies and help them extend Internet services to those who do not have high-speed choices, especially to farmers, for now days, many agricultural transactions are done over the Internet. But if these farmers have only dialup, then these transactions take too long and may cause mistakes.
Ladies and gentlemen of Blytheville, if you live in Blytheville, you are lucky. You have Ritter and the other high-speed Internet choices to choose from. But if you are a resident of the country surrounding Blytheville, then your choices are limited at best. This needs to change so that no matter whether you live in the country or city, whether you are a business or a private individual, whether you live on north, west, east or south side of Blytheville, then you have a choice in high-speed Internet, and those choices are good ones at that.