The quest continues to connect all of Arkansas to the Internet and at faster speeds.
That's been a goal for some time now, most notably since the 2007 start of the now-expired Connect Arkansas.
The private, non-profit corporation is gone because its funding ran out; but the state Legislature is showing renewed interest in the expansion of high-speed broadband.
The Joint Committee on Advanced Communications and Information Technology just last week said it will have a plan to connect every home and business in Arkansas by October 2016.
That's just a year away. But they're only promising a plan, not connections everywhere.
Those connections will come as surely as rural electrification programs decades ago extended that utility to the countryside.
Unfortunately, it takes time to stretch cables or fiber optics or erect wireless towers to serve places where demand or terrain doesn't make the service terribly feasible. And what is available isn't always fast enough to be serviceable.
So much of the challenge is on the Internet providers. Some places have many providers with wide-ranging choices of service. But others may have but one provider and few choices, if any. That's supply and demand at work and hard to overcome.
Certainly, there have been some significant steps toward improving Arkansas' broadband connections.
The most recent is an ongoing effort to connect every school in the state to a new fiber-optic network. It's a huge investment, somewhere between $50 million and $100 million in state and federal dollars; but it is one that should prove valuable not just to the students but also to the state.
Fort Smith schools were the first to connect to the improved Internet system, which is designed to offer speeds 40 times faster than what had been the statewide average.
As Superintendent Benny Gooden said then, the access and the speed are essential in today's education.
"If our students today are going to compete with students all over the world, they're going to have to have these kinds of skills, and we're going to have to have the speed," he said.
Fort Smith schools, which has more than 14,000 students, has long been working on technology and, Gooden said, has more than 13,000 one-to-one devices in the hands of students throughout the district. That includes computers that students can take home in three of the schools in a pilot program Fort Smith plans to expand.
Technology has to be a focus in the schools and many more have been connected to the updated system since Fort Smith schools were. About three school districts a week are being hooked up. Eventually, all of the schools will be.
Soon, the schools should all be turning out even more computer-literate, skilled users of the Internet who will demand even better service in whatever their future endeavors are. The state needs to be ready.
Janet Wilson, a spokesman for the state Information Systems Department, made much the same point last week. The schools, she said, serve as anchor tenants, providing wired infrastructure from which faster Internet service can expand to communities.
"The expectation is there will be enough increased demand to spur greater infrastructure investment in broadband by local, regional or national telecommunications providers," she said.
And now, the Legislature actually sounds as if it is serious about doing what it can to get high-speed service -- clearly difficult to do without in today's culture -- throughout the state.
Remember, Internet communication drives all manner of business, including modern farms. Yet, Arkansas today trails most of the states in the nation, ranking 48th in connectivity, according to broadbandnow.com.
Only 58.5 percent of Arkansans have access to wired broadband as fast as 25 megabits per second, or mbps. Even fewer have the option of faster speeds.
That's not good enough.
State Rep. Stephen Meeks, R-Greenbrier, the legislative committee chairman, said last week that Arkansas has made strides and "studied this to no end." He cited 31 pieces of legislation that have been passed in the last decade on point.
Most of the attention has been on expanding the wired system, but lawmakers talked last week of wireless broadband as a potentially more cost-effective option.
However they achieve this expansion, the sooner the better. Better connectivity is simply essential to the state's future economy and quality of life.
Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist and longtime journalist in Northwest Arkansas. Email her at [email protected].
Commentary on 11/01/2015