will offer
wireless
Internet
By MIKE HELM
Columbus County is about to become a more desirable place to live and more attractive to business, thanks to businessman Tim Blackmon, who is making a large investment in building a wireless high-speed Internet network.
The network will serve rural customers who currently don’t have broadband access and compete with services such as Sprint DSL and Time Warner Roadrunner for individual and business accounts.
Blackmon owns several business ventures, including Radio Shack, CB Electronics and the dial-up Internet service provider Weblink. The new company he is starting will be called Weblink Wireless.
Look online at www.weblinkwirelessnc.com.
Blackmon has teamed up with Frank Strawn, a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles and computer-networking veteran. Blackmon,a Whiteville City Council member thinks Strawn’s expertise in information technology combined with his own expertise in radio engineering will make the venture a success.
Dial-up is currently the only practical option available for 44 percent of rural residents in the county. The service is slow and makes it frustrating to access videos and music on the Web. Most computer users who can afford it prefer broadband Internet service, which costs at least $35 per month. Broadband is essential for e-commerce and other business activities.
Currently, Sprint, Bell South, Time Warner Cable, Star Telephone and two satellite companies make broadband service available to 56 percent of county residents. The telephone companies combined have 56 percent coverage and Time Warner has 19 percent coverage over some of the same areas with its cable modem service. That leaves nearly half of the potential market wide open for Blackmon’s wireless network.
“The rural market is what we want,” Blackmon said.
Blackmon had to make a business decision whether to live with dwindling profits from dial-up service or move into the broadband market.
“It’s cheaper to do wireless (broadband) than it is to do it by phone line,” he said.
“We’re not investing but a billion dollars to do it,” he joked.
Within 30 days, Weblink Wireless will erect a 900 megahertz transmission tower near Courthouse Square in Whiteville. The signal is expected to reach customers in a six and one-half-mile radius.
It will take six antennae to cover the entire county but they won’t all go up at once. Blackmon has an ambitious but cautious plan for building the network. If the first Whiteville antenna tests go well, a second antenna will go up in 60 days in South Whiteville.
Other towers might go up in Lake Waccamaw, Bolton and Tabor City.
Strawn said the company hopes to establish its residential service across the county in four months and then begin offering services to business clients. Wireless technology makes it easy to offer large bandwidth to big users. All it takes is a small antenna rather than miles of wire or optical fiber.
Residential customers would need a receiving antenna that is approximately 18 inches square mounted on their homes. The antenna would provide a full 1.5 megabytes of bandwidth – the equivalent of what is known as a T1 line.
Weblink Wireless expects to charge $34.95 per month, plus $5 per month to rent the antenna and accompanying electronics. That’s $5 more per month than Sprint DSL but Strawn said the extra money is worth it.
“Our quality of service will be better,” he said, noting that Sprint DSL is just 375 kilobytes of bandwidth and users have to purchase a modem and pay a fee. Strawn noted wireless service is also more reliable.
“It won’t go down when a drunk runs into a telephone pole,” he joked.
In the near future, Weblink Wireless would make “voiceover IP” available for $30 per month. Also called digital telephone, the service allows unlimited local and long distance calls over the Internet for the flat rate.
Strawn said that Weblink Wireless would eventually grow into a local telephone company.
To help kickoff the project, Weblink Wireless will offer free wireless service to all of the county’s senior centers. Department of Aging Director Ed Worley has gotten the county to purchase several computers for each center.
Strawn said the centers would be brought on line as the antennae are erected. The Whiteville and Chadbourn senior centers would likely get service first.
Strawn has also been hired to teach the Internet to seniors. He said he would help the “silver surfers” learn how to connect to streaming music, get on e-Bay and connect to senior communities on the Web. Every senior will get a user name and e-mail.
The venture isn’t as risky as it may sound to some. Wireless technology is proven and widely used to provide Internet service in urban areas, which pose challenges in some ways greater than rural areas. The density of buildings in cities impedes the transmission of radio signals.
What is new is that a small company has taken the initiative to bring wireless broadband to a rural county. State support for broadband development has been directed towards getting the large telecoms to provide services.
North Carolina has had great success, going from little access to almost 85 percent broadband coverage across the state. However, companies such as Sprint and Time Warner have traditionally taken a cherry-picking approach and bypassed low-density, less profitable areas such as rural portions of Columbus County. Sometimes, companies are limited by regulated service areas.
The great advantage of wireless technology is that it can reach downtown Whiteville just as easily as a farmhouse or agricultural business in Bug Hill.
A wireless broadband network covers the entire country of New Zealand.
