This article may be of some interest to home buyers moving to rural areas or real estate agents working in rural areas. I originally wrote this for our local newspaper, the Spartanburg (SC) Herald-Journal in July.

Where DSL, cable Internet is unavailable, rural users welcome satellite Internet

Ginny Anderson is all too familiar with that piercing noise - like the screeching wail from a wounded animal or acrylic nails scraping across a classroom chalkboard. Then comes the excruciating part: the waiting, and waiting, and waiting and waiting …

Many in Spartanburg County may have forgotten the hissing sound and snail’s pace of a modem connecting to the World Wide Web, but not Anderson and the other nearly 15 percent of area households who have, in effect, been shut out of the high-speed Internet revolution.

Anderson lives in Pauline, one of several seemingly “rural” parts of the county where busy signals are commonplace and traditional fast Internet service is not.That pretty much rules out talking on the phone and surfing the Net simultaneously. Menial everyday tasks that most take for granted - checking e-mail, sharing photos, banking, paying bills, getting driving directions on MapQuest or chatting on AOL or MySpace - are cumbersome, at best. And downloading the latest Harry Potter movie or Fergie tune for your iPod? Foggetaboutit!

“I do more than just check my e-mail,” Anderson said. “I had to get a second phone line so I wouldn’t tie up my personal one.” A dial-up user for 10 years, Anderson instructs seniors in Greek and Latin through Furman University’s Learning in Retirement program. From her home, she also teaches those languages in online distance learning courses through seniornet.org. In addition, she moderates an online book discussion group for seniors, featuring first-rate guest authors such as Wally Lamb.

But Anderson, who with her husband, Winston, has grown and harvested organic muscadine and scuppernong grapes for the last 26 years at Anderson Vineyards, has given up on waiting - and waiting and waiting - for BellSouth DSL (AT&T) and Charter Communications to come to the rescue.She pulled the plug on both her modem and additional phone line in favor of a new technology - satellite broadband. Two months ago Anderson got WildBlue high-speed Internet service.”I got tired of waiting for the screen to come up,” said Anderson. “Using WildBlue has been a tremendous asset; it makes all the difference for me.” “Between what I was paying for BellSouth dial-up and the extra phone line, I figure I am saving money, too.”

The Andersons are one of an estimated 25 million households and home and small businesses in America that don’t have access to high-speed Internet. In Spartanburg County, communities such as Pauline, Woodruff, Pacolet and parts of Inman, Lake Bowen, Duncan, Landrum and Campobello fall into this category.

Even area elected officials are not immune to the disparity in coverage. “I, too, am without high-speed Internet service at home (in Woodruff) and my high-school-age daughters complain weekly about it,” said State Rep. Keith Kelley (R-District 35). “BellSouth does not service Woodruff and Verizon personnel told me that there isn’t enough density in population in the area. But, I continue to work on this.”

Because telecommunication franchises and companies are not regulated at the local level, county officials have no idea which Internet services companies offer to specific communities. All inquiries are referred to the Federal Communications Commission. A quick survey found that Charter is, by far, the most accessible provider in Spartanburg County, covering about close to 85 percent of households. BellSouth (as well as Earthlink DSL) is only offered to about 50 percent of area residents, although Bellsouth’s Web site states that service will be expanded in the Landrum and Duncan areas after July 31. Alltel DSL blankets a portion of the northwest part of the county including Inman, Landrum and Campobello.

And Chesnee has its own provider with Chesnee Telephone Service’s Peachem DSL. The rest of the county is serviced by satellite companies WildBlue, HughesNet and Earthlink Satellite.

“WildBlue Internet is specifically targeted for those areas that are not currently served, or are underserved, by other high-speed providers,” said WildBlue spokesperson Joanna Dant.

The company now has an estimated 160,000 subscribers in the 48 contiguous states and is adding new customers at a rate of about 10,000 a month.

WildBlue Communications based in Denver, Colo., began offering high-speed Internet via the Anik F2 satellite in June 2005 and launched a second satellite, WildBlue-1, last December that tripled the provider’s bandwidth capacity, Dant said. James Tapp, owner of Satellites Plus in Inman, is a dealer for several satellite-based telecommunications companies including WildBlue, HughesNet, DirecTV and DishTV, whose parent company EchoStar Communications has a dish and receiver refurbishing plant in Spartanburg.

Tapp said WildBlue service has been available in Spartanburg County for about 19 months and it has been in demand “right off the bat.”

“WildBlue is really for people that live out in the country and can’t get anything else,” Tapp said. “It’s good for everything except downloading movies. That may take three to four hours…because you only get so much bandwidth and you have to share the bandwidth with other users.”

Dant concurred in that all Internet technologies (satellite- or land-based) share available network bandwidth in some way and that download speeds may vary. “That will affect about 1 percent of our customer base,” she said.

Similar to traditional satellite TV service, broadband uses a small dish with a clear, unobstructed southern view to receive the signal from the satellite. However, WildBlue’s dish is equipped with both a receiver and a transmitter for two-way satellite connectivity to the Internet. And, no phone lines or cable lines are needed.

Data travels about 45,000 miles to the satellite and back.

This round trip adds about a half-second delay to the time a computer takes to communicate with a Web site or host server. This may also slightly impact voice-over IP (phone service delivered over the Internet) or real-time interactive gaming.

On the company’s Web site, WildBlue is promoted as “an always-on, broadband Internet service that is comparable to DSL services, and is up to 30 times faster than traditional dial-up modem.” However, Dant said, “It is not intended to directly compete or replace cable modem or DSL service.”

Kelli Smith, also of Pauline, would agree with that statement.

A WildBlue subscriber since August 2006, she also works from her home. Before her satellite was installed, she had four dedicated telephone lines: a personal line, a business line, a fax line and a dedicated line just for dial-up.

“With my job, I need high-speed Internet to do just about anything, and to get into and use the systems at work, and that involves a lot of data transfer,” she said.

“Downloading on WildBlue is a lot faster than dial-up, uploading is a little slow.”

“My TV satellite works great, but that’s a one-way signal. WildBlue is probably slower because it’s two-way,” Smith said. “It’s definitely better than dial-up, but very expensive compared to BellSouth DSL.”

However, Smith said satellite broadband is not most dependable situation and is sometimes affected by inclement weather. And the storm doesn’t necessarily have to be in Pauline: it could be anywhere in the signal’s path, including Texas and Canada. “When it’s down, it’s down. My service was down for a week one time. And their customer service is not so great.”

“I have seen BellSouth workers laying fiber-optic cable in the area,” Smith said. “I talked with a technician and he said the BellSouth box near my home is DSL-ready, but the relay station in Spartanburg is just too far away.”

“The higher-ups at BellSouth said DSL would be available within two years in Pauline and that was about six months ago about, but I think with the merger with AT&T, it will be sooner.”