Virgil Shockley tried to buy airline tickets online recently.
“I turn the computer on, and I go get an iced tea, some chips, and it’s still dialing,” he said. “I go get some pretzels, it’s still connecting . . . I take a bathroom break, and it’s still not on . . . it’s ridiculous.”
Shockley, a Worcester County commissioner, doesn’t have a patience problem: He has dial-up Internet service.
Like many residents of rural Maryland, Shockley lives in an area where spotty and slow Internet coverage is normal, and broadband an expensive and rare commodity.
To fix the problem, the state has launched several efforts to put fiber-optic cable across Maryland and help draw service providers into underserved areas.
The Maryland Broadband Cooperative, a public-private partnership formed in 2006, took main responsibility for laying fiber-optic cables across the state. The most recent addition was the completion of a fiber connection between Salisbury University and the NASA facility on Wallops Island, Va., and the announcement Tuesday that next project would string cable across the Bay Bridge.
Final stages of the project, scheduled for 2010, will connect the nine most rural counties and link Southern and Western Maryland.
But the cooperative only gets broadband to an area: Service providers still have to provide “last-mile” coverage in rural communities. That leaves people like Shockley stuck with dial-up until private-sector service providers take the last step.
“Someone has to invest, to take that trunk line into 10 homes spread over 20 acres,” said Memo Diriker, director of a business and economic research and consulting firm at Salisbury University.
Dave Jenkins, executive director of the Rural Maryland Council, said efforts to bring broadband trunk lines to all areas of the state are well-intentioned, but leave a lot of people frustrated.
“They’re well on the way to getting it actually done,” he said, “but it’s pretty frustrating to get that last-mile connection.”
Lack of broadband access is a nationwide problem: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2006 ranked the United States 15th for per capita broadband adoption rates, down from fourth in 2001, according to the economic think tank.
“We’re definitely falling behind other industrial countries,” said Scott Lindsay, co-founder of the national Rural Broadband Coalition.
“Over 60 percent of rural communities across the country lack access to broadband,” said John Dillman, the president of the Maryland Broadband Cooperative. “When you compare us to the rest of the world, we’re heading in the wrong direction.”
Lack of broadband access hurts rural industries and communities, said Shockley, who chairs the state’s Rural Broadband Coordination Board.
“We’re seeing a brain drain,” he said. “The best and the brightest are leaving the Eastern Shore.”
Jobs that would have stayed in the community go elsewhere when young people leave for education and training, Lindsay said.
While younger residents are leaving, more retirees are moving into rural areas, increasing the need for broadband to make up for the “lack of health facilities and specialists be