Building the info highway to Anywhere, U.S.A.

Most of us expect to be wired for whatever comes next in the 21st century. The information age has introduced a variety of new communication services, ranging from high-speed Internet access to enterprise data WANs. Customers have even seen promises for access to interactive, multimedia network services from companies that were once known only as long-distance carriers.

Indeed, everything seems within our reach - that is, if we live in one of the top 100 standard marketing statistical areas.

Sprint's new Integrated On-demand Network, for example, is exciting for those who live in one of these targeted markets, but it has little value to the rest of us who can not access it.

Not everyone lives in the top 100 population centers, and commerce - specifically electronic commerce - does not stop at any city boundary. To truly benefit from the promise of the information age, we must find a way to bring the benefits of new technology to all areas.

Never been easy

Providing communication services to the less populated areas of the world has always been a difficult challenge. In the United States, the Bell System, albeit a monopoly at the time, addressed this challenge by "averaging" the cost of providing rural services with the cost of providing urban services, and it simply recovered these costs in an averaged rate structure.

In today's world, where we are no longer able to average our costs and rate structures, the challenge of providing rural communications seems to have been transferred to the smaller exchange operators.

In major metropolitan areas, new enhanced networks can reach their targeted markets in a variety of ways. They can co-locate with incumbent local exchange carriers and either lease or build direct access connections. In those instances where dial-up access is used, competitive carriers make trunk-side connections to the incumbent's switch and transfer the specialized service calls onto their networks. Either way, the network provider and the customer can find a way to connect.

It becomes a little more challenging to make these connections once you move outside the major cities. While 78.9% of the public libraries located in urban areas have Internet access, only 16.8% of rural libraries have it. Rural and small schools are also less likely to have access. Only 30% of schools with enrollments of less than 300 have Internet access, compared with 58% access for schools with enrollments of more than 1000, according to the U.S. Department of Education, Educational Information Resource Center.

Most backbone network operators or providers of enhanced services are not looking to co-locate in these small exchanges. The market demographics of these less-populated areas do not meet their criteria for network investment. And even if they did extend their networks to these communities, many of the exchanges located in these rural environments do not have the infrastructure to handle digital traffic or higher bandwidth connectivity.

So how do we get these services from the network nodes to the outlying customers that want them? Small exchange operators must begin to align themselves with other exchanges experiencing similar challenges. Interexchange connections must be established that will provide conduits from the enhanced network nodes to their local exchanges.

In Minnesota, for example, the Independent exchanges formed the Minnesota Equal Access Network, now known as Onvoy, which connects their Independent exchanges to long-distance carrier nodes (Figure 1). Similar kinds of relationships must begin to align for the delivery of enhanced services as well.

To accomplish this, other alliances may be necessary. The electric utility industry, for example, has been making significant investments in communication infrastructure to accommodate its own internal requirements. In many instances, these companies have additional capacity that could be leased to enable "long-distance" connectivity between Independent exchanges and access points. The cost of leasing such a connection may be unaffordable for a single exchange operator, but not for a coalition.

Network investment

For the LECs that operate in these secondary and tertiary markets, providing enhanced services will mean having to make some incremental capital investments.

The first requirement may be to upgrade the infrastructure that connects their exchanges to enhanced services networks - or each other - so that they can interconnect at higher bandwidth rates. The second requirement will be to position their exchange's distribution systems to transport and deliver higher-bandwidth services.

The LEC serving smaller markets has several alternatives to consider for rehabilitating its distribution network. First, it can always dig up the streets and put in new fiber optic distribution systems. This requires the acquisition and installation of the fiber optic cable, the fiber multiplexer to light the cable and usually, power at the end points to support the remote terminations (Figure 2). Although this clearly solves all of the bandwidth distribution requirements, it is a very costly scenario, and the economics usually do not work well for smaller exchanges.

As a second option, LECs could purchase specific application electronics to deliver a particular service to a targeted grouping of customers. This scenario usually requires a critical mass of potential customers to form within a geographic area of the exchange to support the investment needed. It also requires the exchange operator to purchase specific electronic packages for each of the intended service offerings (Figure 3).

A third alternative, which has only recently been made available to the industry, calls for the deployment of multiservice access platforms. These platforms enable the exchange operator to deliver more than just one service offering to multiple drops across the local exchange network on different combinations of media (Figure 4). This alternative seems to make the best economical sense for smaller exchanges, which can garner higher utility value from existing plant investment - either copper or fiber - and improve revenue opportunities by offering more services.

The multiservice mindset

Each participating carrier benefits from taking the multiservice approach to serve rural markets. Enhanced network providers can reach more subscribers, thereby increasing the value of the services they provide. The long-haul carrier, whether a pipeline provider or utility company can sell its excess capacity for use by others, therefore increasing its return on infrastructure investment.

The LEC can offer more services, thereby generating new revenues to support the cost of modernizing its networks. And finally, the communities they serve can benefit from an improved quality of life made possible by the timely exchange of information.

The most obvious benefits are in the areas of health care and education. Pennsylvania, a state that claims to have the largest rural population in the country, has formed PA HealthNet, which uses telemedicine systems and the Commonwealth's backbone network. The network links rural physicians with specialists in tertiary care facilities for conducting remote patient examinations and consultations.

Meanwhile, Nebraska has formed Nebraska Educational Telecommunications. Today more than 150 of Nebraska's 300 school districts have direct connection to the Internet; the remainder have access through modems. Countless examples like these are all over the country.

As more services move to the Internet and more commerce is conducted electronically, a community's economic livelihood will become dependent on its ability to connect with others. With these connections, carriers can eliminate the artificial geographic boundaries that have restricted the development of rural communities. Our industry must continue to look for innovative ways to meet the challenge to serve all areas of society if we are going to deliver the full promise of the information age.