Imagine this: It’s a warm August afternoon. You’re sitting on the beach ¬– let’s say Conneaut Township Park ¬-- and you want to check your e-mail. You get out the laptop, fire it up and behold, you’re online.
A few hours later, you’re at grandma’s house in Wayne Township and you want to jump in on the closing seconds of an eBay auction. Once again, you open your laptop and go online¬ without stringing a cable to granny’s land line and waiting forever for your dial-up connection.
If that scenario -- accessibility to a public wireless network from any
location in Ashtabula County ¬-- sounds good, you need to log on to www.ashtabula.com today and complete a survey. And if the idea sounds like a
loser, you also need to share that opinion with the pollster.
The Ashtabula County Online Consortium (ACOC) is seeking public comment to help the all-volunteer group set a direction for 2007. On the table is a proposal to pursue the creation of a public network throughout the county.
While you’re probably unfamiliar with the ACOC, if you have checked a community calendar listing or searched for a local business at www.ashtabula.com, you’ve used their service.
Created with a $75,000 grant from the Civic Development Corporation (CDC) in 1998, the ACOC brought together 10 agencies on one board to identify projects that would improve Ashtabula County’s sense of community through better access to and use of
the Internet. The agencies provide a cross-representative of industry, tourism, education and local government.
Ed Ireland, chairman of the consortium and a representative from Premix,
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says the ACOC’s original task of creating a free-net never occurred because private Internet service providers (ISP) moved into the area and filled the void.
“Free-net never got a chance, but we started to provide other services,”
says Ireland.
Those services included grants for county organizations to get an online presence. The consortium also developed the community Web portal,
Ashtabula.com, as a central repository for information about Ashtabula County. Ireland says the site receives about 2,500 visitors in a typical month.
Dave Jordan, support coordinator for ACOC, says most of the grant money has
been dispersed by the consortium and it is time to find a new direction.
Recognizing the need for additional funding if it is to continue to exist,
the consortium obtained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Jordan says this will enable the consortium to go after grants for operating expenses and special projects.
During 2005, the consortium members created a new mission statement that
recognized the group’s maturation: “ACOC is a volunteer organization whose
purpose is to use Internet technologies to enrich community interaction,
provide technology-based leadership and promote Ashtabula.”
”We’ve kind of shifted our focus and we’re trying to take a leadership role in the county as far as technology topics go and put them out there,” says
Jordan. “We think there is a role in coordinating some of these things.”
The consortium has set March 14 as the date for a community meeting on technology proposals. The meeting, to be held at KSU- |
AC’s Blue and Gold Room, will provide an overview of the ACOC, present the results of the
survey and open the floor to questions, says Irene Edge, the ACOC’s 2007 vice president and a technology instructor at KSU-AC.
Coming from the education sector, Edge sees significant benefits to having wireless broadband access any place in the county ¬– that’s a service that even the KSU’s Ashtabula Campus doesn’t have at this point.
”We're offering a lot of course material and Internet instruction,” she
says. “This would bring the community together as a whole, which is always a
benefit to the education realm.”
Both Jordan and Ireland see wireless broadband as a way to draw new employers to the county. “If Ashtabula County gets on the cutting edge, that
probably would attract more business to the area, awareness and opportunity,” Jordan says.
The ACOC members see wireless broadband as a way to create community in a
county where its residents are separated by miles and diverse lifestyles.
”What we would like to do is make the technology available to bring people together through the use of technology,” says Ireland.
It is the rural nature of the county that has kept telecommunications
companies from investing in the infrastructure needed to bring wireless broadband access to the region. These services already exist in places like Mentor, but Ireland says it’s unlikely a provider will make the investment
in Ashtabula County any time soon.
”I don’t think they have any big plans to expand their services to rural areas,” he says.
However, if the ACOC can |
demonstrate strong public demand for the service
and obtain grants to help implement it, they might be able to convince providers to invest in the region. Ireland says the cost can range from
hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, but there are many grant sources available.
It’s entirely possible users will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to
access the network with their devices, whether that be a laptop computer or cell phone.
All the technical issues would have to be worked out in discussions with providers-- at this point, the ACOC just wants to determine they are on the right track by investigating this possibility. ”First, we want to find out what the community wants,” says Edge. “If this is not the direction they want to go ... we will redirect our focus.”
Take the survey: Log onto www.ashtabula.com and follow the link to the survey. |
