It was 1994 and national online service providers, which today have millions
of subscribers, had just a few hundred thousand "early adopters"
signed up. One of those was Eric Case, a 14-year-old in Marietta, Ohio.
Like many subscribers, Eric was attracted by a promise of hundreds of
initial free hours. The implications of the Internet, he and his father
Phil quickly discovered as they explored this new thing called the World
Wide Web, were almost unimaginable. With the click of his computer mouse,
Eric could connect to sites and people all over the world. "Eric
was growing incredibly fast from his experience on the Internet,"
Phil Case says. "He was testing games from game makers in Finland
and writing FAQs, and it was really neat to watch."
There was only one problem. Neither Eric nor his father had paid attention
to the telephone number that the software used to access the Web. And
one day the telephone bill arrived. The hours of Internet service might
have been free, but the phone connection to the Internet service provider
(ISP), it turned out, was long distance. Every minute Eric was online
the meter was ticking, and Phil Case was suddenly sitting on a $400 telephone
bill.
As the Cases soon learned, there was no local Internet service provider
in Marietta or in all of rural Washington County. The proprietor of his
own oil and gas business and a member of the Marietta City Council at
the time, Phil Case was relatively well off—but even he couldn't
afford $400 a month. "I was really irritated," he says. "Columbus
had a local ISP, and Cleveland had a local ISP, but we didn't, and we
were the ones who really needed it."
In a series of community meetings over the next several months the Washington
County Information Technology Group (WCITG) was born. At first it was
nothing more than a dozen concerned citizens—including Case; Susan
Huck, an information technology manager for a local manufacturing company;
and Pat Foor, superintendent of the Washington County Educational Service
Center/Career Center—and a commitment from Marietta College. The
private 1,100-student liberal arts college already possessed the heart
of any ISP, a powerful computer known as a server, along with a number
of modems and telephone lines. If the WCITG would create and manage an
ISP, the college would, in effect, host it. "It was win-win for the
college," says Beverly Schwartz, its academic grants officer. "We're
one of the largest employers in Marietta, and we have to take care of
our own nest."
From Dream to Reality
But actually creating and managing the ISP was a labor-intensive task, and
big visions though they had, "Being volunteers with full-time jobs, they
weren't making much progress," admits Ed Holzapfel, then vice president
for administrative services at Washington State Community College. To push it
from dream to reality required a full-time staff person, and that required money.
Holzapfel, who knew that the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) had just
launched its telecommunications initiative, offered to write a grant proposal,
with Washington State serving as fiscal agent for the group. The WCITG offered
to give each of the 15 high schools in Washington, Morgan, Meigs, and Monroe
Counties funding of up to $4,000 to complete their connections to the Web.
Thanks to a modest three-year grant from ARC in 1996, the WCITG became not
just a name, but Marietta's first ISP, offering local dial-up Web access for
about $10 a month. It is now self-sufficient. "It's my feeling that without
that ARC grant for a full-time staff person to get it up and running, the WCITG
wouldn't have been successful," says Holzapfel, now vice president for
academics and dean of the Ross School of Management and Leadership at Franklin
University in Columbus. "It's an excellent example of what some seed money
can do," he says.
These days the Internet has grown so big that some of the early predictions
about it can seem like forgotten dreams. Even as it knocked down barriers of
time and distance, for instance, the Web was supposed to facilitate a new sense
of community in a medium controlled by no one but its users. In Marietta that's
exactly what happened: the WCITG has formed the kind of self-governing, not-for-profit
Internet that brings the larger world—and the community—closer. Today,
although local access is now available in Marietta from commercial companies,
850 WCITG customers roam the world through a series of humming boxes in the
basement of a Marietta College building, and the service has long been financially
self-sufficient.
Like Web clients everywhere, when WCITG customers have a problem, they call
the ISP's help number. But instead of getting some anonymous voice, they talk
to project director Kyungmi Oh or help desk staffer Matt Ruble, who will diagnose
their Web woes, advise them on what equipment to buy, or even come to their
house and install their system for the princely sum of $15. But just as important
are the WCITG's free seminars, taught by volunteers (who get paid in free service),
open to all (whether they're WCITG customers or not), in everything from Unix
to Internet genealogy to online investing. Anyone can propose and teach a seminar,
and since the first seminar in 1997, some 3,000 people have participated.
Access to the World
Taken together, the WCITG's services make it that much easier to bring everyone
online and to make them technologically literate once they are. "The WCITG
offers me an inexpensive route to the Internet," says Darran Huggins, a
67-year-old retiree living on a limited income, who keeps in touch with his
children via email. "The WCITG is very important to my life. It has given
me access to the world at a very reasonable rate."
"I couldn't even spell computer," confesses Virgil Archer, 69, whose
attendance at a WCITG basic computer seminar convinced him that he should—and
could—buy a computer himself.
"I think the seminars are really important," says Susan Huck, who
is now a WCITG board member. "You see a lot of people who are hesitant
and the classes don't require a huge commitment, but they give people a push
to go online. We're not exactly a metropolis, and once they do, it opens up
the world to them." Because the college is a nonprofit institution, the
WCITG has shied away from promoting its services directly to business. Nevertheless,
says David Brightbill, executive director of the Community Action Program Corporation
of Washington-Morgan Counties, Ohio, and a WCITG board member, it's important
to think of even personal Internet service as a tool for economic development.
"It's ludicrous to think you can have a thriving economy without easy and
inexpensive Internet access," says Brightbill. "We have lots of jobs
here that don't pay very much. The difference between what we charge and the
commercial companies charge is $10 a month, and that's significant if you work
a minimum-wage job."
If a rural and relatively isolated region is going to retain—and attract—workers,
he says, every person has to become fluent in the Web and have access to the
same information that people in the big cities have. "We have to have kids
experienced with computers," agrees Phil Case, "for us to be a force
in the emerging economy."
Of course, not all families have computers at home. Marietta's Family Learning
Center, administered by Marietta City Schools, offers computer literacy training
for all ages, and an open-access community computing center that gives residents
hands-on experience with computers. At the core of the center are 12 machines
linked to an incongruous and very-low-tech-looking antenna sprouting from the
center's chimney, which transmits a high-speed Internet connection to Marietta
College. Access through that line to the Marietta servers is free, courtesy
of the WCITG and the college. "We could never afford to pay commercial
rates for a high-speed connection for 12 computers," says program aide
Chris Clark, "and without the Internet the computers would be nothing.
We just had kids from Marietta Middle School here working on research projects
about different countries, and with a couple of clicks, one boy was in Syria!"
Phil Case is now looking at a new challenge: How to bring high-speed, broadband
connections to the furthest reaches of the county. "Broadband is going
to be a huge hurdle for rural communities" who don't have the fiber optic
connections or the $50 to $90 a month such access typically costs through a
telephone company, he says. "And you don't have to be a rocket scientist
to see the problems with letting commercial companies take care of it. Nobody
wants to compete for places like Marietta, much less sparsely populated parts
of Washington County." But Case is imagining, as the WCITG's client base
and thus its cash flow grows, of installing a network of point-to-point transmitters
like the one at the Family Learning Center at the towers of volunteer fire houses
"or the guy who dispatches cement trucks." Listening to Case's vision
it's hard not to get excited: A rural county teeming with high-speed Internet
access that costs almost nothing. "I know it can be done," he says.
"We just have to get creative."
Carl Hoffman is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. |