High Tech Missouri?
The following article in the Springfield News-Leader caught my attention this morning. When I moved to Lesterville in 1983 the TV cable stopped at Ebert's Garage on Peola Road, one and a half miles from my home. That is where it stops today. There is no DSL or Cable connections in Reynolds County as far as I know. Camp Taum Sauk installed "Wild Blue" this summer, this is a satillite internet service, not as fast as Broadband and much more expensive. I don't see any leadership in Missouri from either the Governor or the Legislature to see that rural Missouri is fully connected at high speeds to the rest of the world. Some of the rural schools have a high speed land line, but I don't see that it has made much difference in the quality of students. As someone that moved here from another state I have always found Missouri a hard place to figure out.
posted by staff @ 7:36 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Lee, What can we do to get high speed internet to our communities? I live in a rural area that is only 60 miles from downtown St. Louis and my only internet options are dial-up or a satellite dish.
Lee, First let me say thanks for the effort you have made to get the Black River News out to the rest of us, and for deciding to continue the blog a while longer. I found you through the Experience Black River website, and I now check daily.
I have lived in Missouri for my entire life (over 50 years) and this is just one of many puzzling things I have encountered. I live about 50 miles from St. Louis and less than 400 yards from the city limits. Cable TV or any sort of high speed internet may as well be on the moon! And this is in a Class A county!!
As far as getting better services to our rural areas, perhaps some sort of a co-op effort would work. I'm thinking our individual voices are just easy to ignore, both in Jefferson City and in the boardrooms of corporations. Maybe local companies could be franchised similar to the McDonalds method. Maybe someone else with more insight could shed more light on this whole situation.
In 1999 it took me 4 months to get dial-up in Lesterville. Semo.net from Poplar Bluff agreed to provide service if I could get 50 people to sign up. There are only 350 phones in the 637 service area. It was easy to get 35 people to sign, but took forever to get the last 15. Then when service started we had over 70 customers almost immediately. I live too far from the switch to ever get DSL and like I said in my post there isn't much in the way of cable service in this area and for people that have cable they don't have access to internet service. Guess we need more Republican business men to build summer cabins in the area.
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