THIS MAY come as a surprise to those in the Fredericksburg area still plodding around the Internet on dial-up, waiting in exasperation for the build-out of broadband access.
But we're living on the fast lane of America's information highway. Virginia has left California and New York behind in the cyber dust.
A new report by the Communications Workers of America says the Old Dominion has jumped to the fourth-highest median connection speed in the nation at 5.0 mbps, way up from a ranking of 11th in the country last year.
Rhode Island tops the CWA list at 6.8 mbps, while Internet users wait the longest for downloads in Alaska, at 0.8 mbps. According to the report, "the same file that takes 30 seconds to download in Rhode Island would take more than four minutes in Alaska."
The national report
The CWA credits Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine "for bringing attention to this important issue through the creation of the Broadband Task Force, which promotes build-out of broadband access across Virginia." And Kaine does deserve praise for efforts including the state's investment of $300 million into broadband networks in rural parts of the state. Part of that money came from proceeds from the class-action tobacco litigation of the 1990s, so if you lit up cigarettes 10 years ago, you're lighting up laptops now.
"It is a work in progress," Kaine told BroadbandCen sus.com recently. "I am fortunate in that the chairman of my broadband committee who is working on this is a guy who knows a little bit about the telecom industry." That would be Mark Warner. The Web site notes that Warner, the Virginia governor who preceded Kaine, was a cellular telecommunications executive before being elected in 2001.
Warner, who's running for the U.S. Senate, addressed the issue of America becoming less competitive as it lags behind other nations in broadband connectivity during a talk this week at Germanna Community College hosted by the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance. He said investment in infrastructure, including broadband build-out, should be an issue addressed in the presidential campaign.
"I'd love to hear from Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain--maybe they think it's not sexy enough, but this country needs a 21st century plan for investment in infrastructure," Warner said, including broadband. "Unless we can deliver high speed Internet connectivity, you can write off most of rural America."
Put into perspective, we have little to be celebrating in the fact that Virginia has moved up the CWA rankings list. The truth is that if Fredericksburg was just outside Tokyo or Seoul instead of Washington, we'd have ultra high speed broadband access right now. Even those of us with broadband access are experiencing speeds that are far lower than other nations.
The CWA Speed Test, which measures the last-mile speed of a user's Internet connection, shows that the median real-time download speed in the United States is 2.3 megabits per second, and that's embarrassing. The same report says average download speeds in Japan are 63 mbps, in South Korea, 49 mbps, and in France 17 mbps.
"This isn't about how fast someone can download a full-length movie," Larry Cohen, president, Communications Workers of America said in a statement. "Speed matters to our economy and our ability to remain competitive in a global marketplace. Rural development, telemedicine and distance learning all rely on truly high-speed, universal networks."
"We are the only industrialized nation without a national policy to promote universal, high-speed Internet access--and it shows," Cohen said in the statement.
Studies show about 15 percent of Americans still use dial-up to connect to the Internet.
FCC head Kevin Martin considers this situation such a threat to America's competitiveness that he wants to take major steps, including redirecting an old federal subsidy previously applied to phone service in rural areas. He wants to use the universal service fund, now $6 billion a year, to help low income families to pay for broadband access.
To help those in rural areas, Martin also wants to take a chunk of wireless spectrum used by cell phone carriers and attach a "free broadband" condition to its sale.
Virginia is doing its part.
It's time to act nationally, before frustration over not being able to download "Spiderman III" fast turns into being stuck in a spider web of economic decline.
Michael Zitz: 540/846-5163
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com