on the cover / By Bob Doran

Broadband to the Backwoods

Bringing Humboldt up to speed, the wireless way

(April 5, 2007)  The cream-colored box marked “RuralConnect™Trailblazer™” is just a display model mounted on a telescoping pole in the large, dark garage in what was once the Arcata headquarters of Yakima, now home to Carlson Wireless Technologies Inc. It’s one element in an exhibit the company is assembling for an upcoming telecom trade show. The square, gunmetal gray device at the top of the pole doesn’t look like a microwave antenna, but that’s what it is. With a little imagination you can place them where they would really be employed: on some windswept mountaintop at the edge of wired civilization, mounted on a lonely pole or perhaps even on a tree.

“It’s called the master, or the line termination,” says Jim Carlson, as he shows a reporter around the facility. “It’s used at the end of the phone lines, up on a ridge or some place at the end of the telephone company’s service. There might be a ranch in another canyon five miles away, or even 10 or 20, where they’d like to have phone service and Internet. You point the antenna over to the ranch and it saves obtaining rights of way, running wires, digging trenches for five to 20 miles. The particular product is designed for isolated areas that are geographically unobtainable due to some obstacle.”

Jim Carlson in the new Arcata offices of Carlson Wireless Technologies. Photo by Bob Doran.

GALLERY >

It’s something of a cliché at this point, but we are living in a digital age, a time when information is the hot commodity. Computers are being reconfigured as entertainment delivery devices bringing a world of news, music and movies to us at the touch of a button. Telecommuting has become commonplace. Distance learning and telemedicine are on the rise. It’s a time when, at least in theory, you can live and work wherever you want, connecting with the rest of the world via that vast web we call the Internet to share in the digital revolution.

The trouble is, not everyone has equal access to this wave of the future. Particularly in California, telecom companies crisscrossed urban areas with fiber-optic cable during the silicon gold rush at the end of the ‘90s, laying so much, in fact, that we know have what’s know as “dark cable,” unused for lack of demand. Such was not the case in rural areas like Humboldt, where a full fiber connection wasn’t available until late in 2003. Even today, high-speed Internet service - broadband - is only available in the 5-10 percent of the county within reach of the 101 corridor, where the fiber runs.

How can we bring broadband to the rest of the county? Wireless connections would seem to be a likely solution, and we’re not talking about the kind of wireless you use at the coffeeshop downtown.

At the airport

The backwoods digital divide was not what was on people’s minds at the Arcata Airport on a recent Wednesday morning. The high tech crowd and a couple of county supervisors, Bonnie Neely and John Woolley, were there to celebrate the completion of a free Wi-Fi system serving the airport, one of just seven free systems in airports around the United States.

A TV crew and a couple of reporters were on hand to record the event for posterity as speeches were made. In his remarks Scott Joachim, whose firm, C4I Security, installed the system, proclaimed, “There’s no reason why we should settle for less technology just because we’re behind the Redwood Curtain.”

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NEXT PAGE >SHARE