Another place Rico can't live

Katharine Seelye has an article in The New York Times about Idaho:

Barry Ramsay (photo), who owns a small manufacturing company in Potlatch, Idaho, between two mountains, remembers the day his internet connection crashed for several hours. Work crews had to ride up in snowmobiles to discover the problem. “They said that bears had been rubbing against the towers,” Ramsay said. In this mountainous state, where some connections depend on line of sight, even snow and fog can disrupt the signals. “These are the kind of problems you probably don’t have in an urban area,” he said.

According to a new study, they are among the problems that have earned Idaho an unfortunate distinction: it had the slowest Internet speeds in the country earlier this year for residential customers who were downloading things like games, a “dismal” average of 318 kilobytes per second.
Translation: In Idaho, it would take you 9.42 seconds to download a standard music file compared with 3.36 seconds in Rhode Island, the state with the fastest average speeds, at 894 kilobytes per second.
The slowest city, by the way, was also in Idaho: in Pocatello, it would take nearly twelve seconds to download that music file, according to a study by Pando Networks, a company that helps consumers accelerate downloads. In the nation’s fastest city, Andover, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, it would take just over one second.
Such speed distinctions might seem insignificant. But, with larger files, downloading delays of just a few seconds can stretch into crucial minutes or hours and over time result in losses across many aspects of life, some experts say, beyond entertainment and games, affecting fields such as public safety, education, and economic growth. It is not clear how many households throughout this state still have no internet, but nationally, the figure is 28 percent, most of them in rural areas.
The United States as a whole lags in speed, coming in 25th behind South Korea, which has the fastest speeds in the world. Even Romania clocks in ahead.
“This is about our overall competitiveness,” said Jonathan Adelstein, the administrator of the federal government’s Rural Utilities Service and a major advocate of broadband. “Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential. And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy.”
More than eleven federally funded projects are under way in Idaho, at a cost of $25 million, to establish high-speed broadband. Yet this sparsely populated, mountainous state still lags in residential speeds, and the Pando study is only the most recent indicator. The federal government’s National Broadband Map put Idaho at 47th for download speeds of three megabits or greater. But the Pando study stung the collective psyche of officials here. “The last thing I need is a report that says we don’t have the capacity and speed, when I know it exists,” said Gynii A. Gilliam, executive director for the Bannock Development Corporation, a nonprofit group working for economic growth in the Pocatello area. She noted that Allstate Insurance was opening a $22 million call center in Pocatello and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a service center there. “We have not lost any business because of internet speeds,” she said.
Indeed, speeds for Idaho’s businesses can be as fast as those anywhere, if customers pay for it. The Federal government says Idaho is among the states with the greatest disparity in speeds available in urban areas versus rural areas. Even Gilliam acknowledged that her home service was sluggish. “It feels like it’s moving in slow motion,” she said. “A lot of times I’ll start downloads and not complete them.” She said she was happy as long as she could get email.
But others are concerned. “We have not been participating in the telecommunications revolution,” lamented State Representative John Rusche, a retired pediatrician, a former health insurance executive, and the Democratic leader in the State House. As someone concerned about electronic medical records, he has been pushing for better internet service for years.
The Pando study examined four million actual download speeds of Pando-supported products— games, antivirus software, and television shows— by residential customers across the country from January to June. The study found the fastest residential internet speeds in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and the slowest in the Mountain West.
Idaho encapsulates some of the challenges for mountain states. Home to the Bitterroot Range of the Rockies, the state is crisscrossed by a series of peaks, ridges, forests, high plateaus, and river valleys, making it expensive to lay cable or build towers.
“We have a guy here who was dropped into remote, isolated areas of Iraq to set up their telecommunications systems,” said Christine L. Frei, director of the Clearwater Economic Development Association in Lewiston. “He told me, ‘We had better communications in Iraq than you have in central Idaho.’”
Idaho is also sparsely populated, with an average of nineteen people per square mile. (Rhode Island, by comparison, has more than a thousand people per square mile.) Providers have little financial incentive to build a whole infrastructure across rugged terrain just to reach one or two homes.
“We’re in business to make a profit,” said Jim Schmit, vice president and general manager in Idaho for CenturyLink, formerly Qwest and now the state’s largest internet service provider. Still, Schmit said that ninety percent of CenturyLink customers had “access” to broadband, though he declined to say how many of those who could subscribe actually did so.
Bibiana Nertney, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Commerce, said residential customers often could not afford broadband. “It’s not the lack of availability,” she said. “It’s the lack of demand and what people are willing to pay. It goes to Idaho’s philosophy and mentality that we don’t spend more than we need.”
While grants and loans are available to build out the internet infrastructure, Kerrie Hurd, the broadband liaison for the Federal Department of Agriculture Office of Rural Development in Idaho, said the grant requirements could be onerous. “Not a lot of communities are willing to put in the application and find the broadband provider, especially when taxpayers want money to spend on an essential service, like fixing the streets and updating the sewer system,” she said.
A bright spot is the Idaho Education Network, which provides high-speed broadband to all high schools in the state and allows residents and business owners to use the service at the schools. Unfortunately, because of cuts to school funding, some schools are open fewer hours.
To address the cost issue, Schmit of CenturyLink said that, starting next month, the company would offer broadband services at a discount to low-income customers.
But some say more needs to be done. “I don’t think enough people understand just how bad the situation is,” said Susan Crawford, who focused on broadband issues for President Obama early in his administration. “It really is time for this country to invest in getting its citizens online where we don’t have internet access, especially in rural areas, so we stop sending jobs to India that we could be sending to Idaho.”

Rico says he supposes he could live without decent internet access, but he chooses not to. (And, South Korea, okay, but we're behind Romania? That's terrible.) Ah, Bibiana Nertney, there's a name to conjure with...