WEBER CITY, Va. – More than $45 million in grants and loans from the federal stimulus package will provide high-speed Internet access to 7,500 homes, businesses and community institutions in four Southwest Virginia localities.
The funding also could open the Lenowisco Planning District – including the city of Norton, and Lee, Scott and Wise counties – to numerous economic development opportunities, including major telecommunications facilities and cottage industries based out of people’s homes.
“It is critical that we make these investments,” U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-9th, said Monday as he announced the funding package during a news conference at the Weber City Town Hall. “This infrastructure is the foundation of our future economic growth.”
Boucher said the $45 million funding package is the largest federal investment in far Southwest Virginia since the Federal Bureau of Prisons built the $102 million Lee County federal penitentiary in the late 1990s.
The broadband package consists of $31.5 million in grants and $13.6 million in low-interest loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Recovery Act Broadband Program. The money will provide new Internet connections to 24 communities in the planning district’s four localities. By the time the new broadband connections are installed, Boucher said, more than 85 percent of the homes and businesses in those localities will have high-speed Internet access.
“That’s going to be important on a number of fronts,” said Skip Skinner, executive director of the Lenowisco Planning District Commission.
Skinner said the new broadband service will allow the region’s residents to run any Internet-based business, such as a Web design or hosting firm, out of their homes. They’ll also be able to work jobs in such fields as accounts payable, billing and customer service that some companies are offering through a telecommuting arrangement, he said.
Having high-speed Internet access also makes the region a strong candidate for new large-scale data centers that would host the vast amounts of digital content people access from their mobile phones and home computers, said Paul Elswick, president of Sunset Digital Communications, which will spend the next three years installing the new connections.
“We’ll have the same bandwidth here that they have in Northern Virginia,” Elswick said, referring to a part of the state that saw a huge economic boom during the past decade because of its broadband infrastructure.
Even Elswick’s company is going to have an economic impact on the region. By the time the project is finished, he said, Sunset Digital will have hired about 75 new employees who will build and maintain the new broadband network.
gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518
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