to reach before the New Deal really opened the area up bringing in
improved communications, roads, electricity and telephones.
The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) under
the New Deal brought electricity and telephones to rural parts
of the US, enabling commerce, education and manufacturing
outside the cities.
With telephone service news and commerce could now
travel at the speed of light.
The first half of the Twentieth Century brought voice
telephones to anyone that wanted them, no matter their income
or location. The latter half of the Twentieth Century brought
us digital communications (modems) on top of the voice lines.
With that came on line ordering, on line banking, electronic mail
and file transfers, such as sending in accounting data to
head office.
Data communications have like the voice telephone
before it have gone from something that interested and helped
commerce and some hobbyists to a daily essential.
Today, with an internet connection you can handle
accounts, send e-mail, video-conference, watch movies, send
documents around the world in seconds, look at remote cameras at
the front door or your holiday home. If you make phone calls via
the internet using Voice over IP. Your work phone extension can
now also be a phone in your house this makes working from home a
breeze.
Adding all these features to the Internet requires
faster internet speeds. When a house has someone watching
streamed movies, someone killing Zombies in an online game and
someone having a video chat a regular DSL or cable
connection gets overwhelmed. These days with all these services
available your internet connection tends to choke. Web pages
start taking a long time to load, streamed movies pause and stutter,
online games become hard to play.
What we need is wider pipes. Just as the solution to
traffic clogging a road is more lanes, the solution is a fatter
pipe to the home or business.
The way to do this is go away from using copper to send
data (DSL via the phone line and TV Cable) and move to glass
(fiber optic cable).
There are limits to the amount of data you can carry on
copper. How much better is fiber? Currently a copper internet
connection to your home is like a goat path and a fiber connection
to your home is like a six lane straight highway.
Tillamook county has fiber everywhere, buried along our
roads along the railway line and attached to power poles, as I like to say
“Tillamook county has more fiber than a vegan potluck”.
There is an Inter Government Agency called Tillamook Lightwave. Currently they provide high speed wide bandwidth Internet Access to County offices, schools, libraries and big companies like the Tillamook Creamery. We need that same good service in all our homes and businesses.
Here in Oregon, the cities of Sandy and Hillsboro amongst
others have affordable fiber to the home, so it can be done.