Need for speed

LAURIE EDWARDS

Cedric Rogers drives across Virginia for Verizon Wireless to test its cellphone and Internet service. The lake area may be added to his route if the 2010 Census indicates enough population growth.

LAURIE EDWARDS

Kevin Wagner (left) of Moneta and his brother, Marcus, who was visiting from Indiana, brought their laptops to Solid Ground Coffee & Tea for a cup of joe and the wi-fi Internet access.

How's your high-speed Internet connection, Smith Mountain Lake? Wait, do you even have a connection?

"I have dial-up at home," said Brad Enslow. "The dial-up just drives you nuts to sit there and wait and wait."

Instead, the Moneta resident, laptop in tow, heads to a lake restaurant such as Solid Ground Coffee & Tea, El Torito or Jonathan's that offers free wireless Internet access to paying customers.

He's not alone. On any given morning, between breakfast and lunch, Solid Ground Coffee & Tea is filled with customers surfing the Web while sipping on coffee.

Sebastiano Stia owns a house at the lake but spends most of the year in New England. While high-speed Internet is available at his Moneta home, he said he's not at the lake often enough to warrant paying for the service.

"I can come here, have a nice cup of coffee and relax," said Stia. "They get a customer and I get access."

But not everyone at the lake doesn't have Internet access by choice. Some live in dead zones, those pockets that signals don't reach.

There are ongoing measures in Bedford and Franklin counties, as well as at various Internet companies, to blanket the area to ensure everyone who wants access has it.

Those who don't face the same obstacle: topography. Most Internet providers depend upon Internet towers that bounce the signal from one to the next. The many mountains and hills around the lake interfere with the signal.

In most cases, that means more towers are needed. But more towers require accessible land. And all of this requires money.

Some are holding out for federal stimulus money. Last month, about $4 billion became available to localities and businesses interested in expanding broadband accessibility through the federal Department of Commerce and Department of Agriculture.

But, it may take several months to several years to fully blanket the entire region. Here is what the counties and two Internet providers are doing to that end.

Bedford County

One of the easiest ways to keep the Internet signal going is to locate rods on existing towers or structures. But first, you need to know where they are.

Virginia's Region 2000 Partnership -- which serves Amherst, Appomattox Bedford and Campbell counties and the cities of Bedford and Lynchburg -- recently completed a vertical asset (or tall stuff) survey.

Bryan David, executive director of Region 2000, said locating all the tall stuff was time-consuming. The survey included finding both vertical assets that are traditionally used to locate Internet rods such as communications towers and water tanks, but also nontraditional items such as power poles and football stadium lights.

The tall stuff was mapped in a computer database. It will be accessible later to engineers who will determine which assets would be most beneficial to accommodate rods or antennas, said David.

"The next step is getting with private companies," he said. "We are also ... working with Bedford County ... to help develop a strategy that would incorporate partnering with private companies."

The county recently created the Bedford County Broadband Authority Board. Staffed by the Bedford County Board of Supervisors, the BCBAB will look to create a public-private partnership, said Frank Rogers, assistant county administrator.

In such a partnership, the county and the BCBAB would align with a private Internet provider to gain county-wide access.

"We're waiting for the providers to say how much they will cover," said Rogers.

Franklin County

Franklin County already has formed a public-private partnership with B2X OnLine, a Salem-based provider that serves portions of the SML area. But the partnership currently only serves a portion of the county seat: Rocky Mount.

To get coverage into the far reaches of the county, there's the Last Mile Broadband project, a partnership between Ferrum College and Franklin County.

The project, which was made possible by a grant from the Jesse Ball duPont Foundation, involves students in a variety of fields working with the professors and county staff to develop a county-wide broadband Internet plan.

George Loveland, an associate professor of library sciences at Ferrum who worked on the project through 2007-08, said around 40 students in a variety of studies including English, drama, political science and geography are involved in the project.

"They're working on different projects, but the students are going to work together," said Loveland. "They're looking at a common problem."

"It's a great initiative," said Sandie Terry, information technology director for Franklin County.

She said the GIS data of unserved areas, as plotted by Ferrum students, will provide the county with a framework as access is extended through the county.

"We have essentially the whole southern part, the northwest part," said Terry. "Those are the largest unserved areas."

She said the county will take proposals from private Internet companies, including B2X OnLine, to get access to all those areas over time.

Verizon

You know those "Can you hear me now?" commercials by Verizon Wireless? Turns out they're an inside joke by the cellphone and Internet service company.

They're about people such as Cedric Rogers, one of about 100 men and women whose job is to drive across the country and test Verizon's coverage.

Virginia employs five testers. Every quarter, Rogers drives from his home in Yorktown to Southwest Virginia and a sliver of West Virginia in an unmarked 2005 Chevrolet Trailblazer.

The vehicle is equipped with cellphones from all local providers that send and receive calls every 2 ¹₂ minutes. Equipment also tests data usage to determine Internet access and speeds.

Rogers said the data is given to Verizon engineers who work to provide coverage in areas where none is available. And it's people like Rogers who let them know where those areas are.

Currently, Rogers' route takes him around Smith Mountain Lake, but he never passes through the area. Rogers said that may change when the 2010 census reveals the population growth in the area in the past 10 years.

But even when the day comes that Rogers drives his car down Virginia 122, the service won't be improved overnight.

"This area is real mountainous," said Rogers. "And down here by the lake, with wireless technology, the water actually reflects the signal."

So Verizon's engineers will have to come up with methods to keep both the mountains and the lake from stopping the signal.

Sherri Cunningham, a Verizon spokesperson for the Virginia/Maryland/D.C. region, said placing new towers can be a long and drawn-out process.

"We have to go through the local zoning process," she said. "It can take a year, sometimes it can take five years."

Cunningham said when a tower is placed in a rural area, it can be disguised as a tree to blend in with the surroundings.

But, she saidn the preferred method of expanding service is to place a rod or antenna on an existing structure, from silos and church steeples to existing towers and water towers.

WildBlue

Perhaps one of the few wireless high-speed Internet options that doesn't require a line-of-sight with a tower is satellite. WildBlue has two satellites that cover Virginia, servicing 14,000 customers. Those customers have no other options for Internet access outside of dial-up, said Lisa Scalpone, vice president of legal and governmental affairs for WildBlue.

"We really only sell into those markets that are called unserved," she said. "Our best customer is a rural American without access to a wire-line technology."

Instead of needing a line-of-sight to the nearest tower, all WildBlue customers need is a direct line of sight to the southern sky, said Scalpone.

"You guys are our exact market," she said.

But there are too many in that exact market. Right now, WildBlue's two Virginia satellites are at capacity.

"We very much limit the number of subscribers we load onto our satellites ... so we don't overload our satellites," she said.

That's the bad news, said Scalpone. The good news is that WildBlue is applying for stimulus money to launch a third satellite, one with 10 times the capacity of the current satellites.

"The mega-satellites are optimized for the content-heavy type of Web usage that we see today and that we're predicting," said Scalpone. "So in the future, a couple years down the road, is that there will be plenty of capacity."

In the meantime, upgrades and improvements to WildBlue's service are expected to roll out by the end of the year, said Scalpone.