Western North Carolina’s picturesque, rugged topography inspires writers, poets and artists of all kinds and attracts thousands annually who are drawn to its beautiful vistas, glorious sunsets and unique regional culture. Unfortunately, that scenery and the region’s sparse population means many residents of the Land of the Sky lack access to a necessity for modern life—broadband communications.
UNC Asheville students and faculty are key participants in a regional initiative, The WNC Broadband Project, to support communities looking to gain and ensure access to reliable, “truly high-speed” internet service. In Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania counties alone as much as 13 percent of the children in public schools lack internet access at home and as much as 35 to 40 percent lack access to high-speed broadband for educational purposes.
“Access to broadband is a safety issue, it’s an educational issue, it’s a recreational issue, it’s a health issue,” said Sonya DiPalma, chair and associate professor of mass communication and a member of the WNC Broadband project team.
During the spring of 2022, students in DiPalma’s senior seminar in mass communication produced eight multimedia projects that highlighted the breadth and complexities of the problems stemming from the lack of access to broadband communications.
There’s the story of Sky Top Orchard in Zirconia, where the lack of a strong Wi-Fi connection makes it difficult to run more than three cash registers using technology like Square. Thousands of visitors visit Sky Top each fall, and the owners want to accommodate these large crowds by using Internet-based technology to run operations. The owners had a DSL line that was unreliable, and after considering dropping the service to search for another internet service provider soon realized they had few options at their disposal. The orchard is currently using Verizon hotspots to run operations, but they are in increasing need of more data, and using satellite broadband services, like Skylink, isn’t feasible at their location.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began Bruce Drysdale Elementary, a Henderson County school with a dual-language program, followed protocols to aid students who did not have access to the internet from home. As classroom learning went virtual because of the pandemic, the school was able to provide hotspots and offer discounted internet services to households lacking internet access.
Now that students have returned to in-person learning and COVID restrictions are eased, students can no longer access the hotspots initially given to them by the school. In addition to the technological hurdles, there remains the fact that for many families in that area Spanish is the primary language used at home, creating a “dual inconvenience” that widens the digital divide, DiPalma said.
“So, you have a language barrier, you’re not familiar with the technology, you do not have Internet at home,” said DiPalma. “And with some of these households, they are dependent upon their children to translate for them.”
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