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MINDING YOUR
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BAUD RATE By George Lyle |
In Bedford these days, the in word is “T-1.”
The translation for non-Bedfordites: fast, very fast. The city of Bedford and Bedford CableVision joined forces last fall to launch what is perhaps Virginia’s fastest Internet service. Utilizing new fiber-optic lines that also carry television signals, the new service provides Internet access at T-1 speeds – up to 200 times faster than traditional telephone lines. |
“There are files out there [on the Internet] that would take six or seven hours to download,” says City Manager Jack Gross. “With those files you would start downloading, go to bed, and hope you had something in the morning. But now you can download that file in 45 seconds.”
The public-private venture was made possible in large part because of a $1.1 million cable upgrade that brought 31 miles of 750-megahertz fiber-optic cable to the area.
| The service has linked Bedford’s county and city governments and their schools to each other and the Internet, and it is slowly being expanded to serve the 2,500 cable television customers in the area. The service also offers traditional telephone-modem access to the Internet, but these links are limited to the 28.8-baud rate offered by most Internet providers. |
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The relatively rural and relaxed Bedford joins the likes of New York City and Rochester, N.Y., as one of the first few cities with high-speed cable access to the Internet, according to Chuck Flournoy, general manager of Virginia operations for Rifkin & Associates, the cable service’s parent company. “What makes this so unusual is that this is a smaller system in a small community and we are really focusing on local content,” says Flournoy. Bedford, he believes, is the smallest community to go on-line through the company’s cable system.
The high-speed connection unleashes all sorts of potential applications, including real-time videoconferencing and virtual video offices where employees work from multiple locations in Roanoke and Lynchburg. Flournoy says the technology will be a significant draw for potential industries and equates it to building a shell building in an industrial park. “People and business will not only start to use the Internet for the first time, but business will move to Bedford because of this,” says Flournoy.
As City Manager Gross jumps from web page to web page with the speed of a television remote, he marvels at the potential. “That kind of connectivity is kind of hard to grasp,” he says. “It’s like when the fax machine first came out: People just kind of looked at it and said, ‘What am I going to do with that when I can just go to the post office?’ But of course now you can’t do business without a fax machine.”
The new Bedford network, which has yet to adopt a catchy name, also benefits from being in the local calling areas of both Lynchburg and Roanoke. So the potential customer base for telephone-modem users can grow into those markets easily, according to Flournoy.
The geography, combined with the technology, just might put Bedford in the catbird seat. “We have had a vision of Bedford being on the cutting edge of advanced technology,” says Bedford Mayor Mike Shelton. “We stand to serve as a technological gateway between these two major metropolitan areas.”
© MARCH 1997, VIRGINIA BUSINESS MAGAZINE