The Town At The End of Dial Tone

Three years ago, the town of McDermitt, Nevada, sorely lacked broadband. Not that Pat Goff set out to change that, but he did.

Goff, a 33-year-old high-school business and computer teacher, wanted to bridge this particular portion of the digital divide and allow his students to learn enough about the Web to prepare them for life after graduation, whether that was technical school, junior college, four-year college, or a job.

Outside of rural Nevada, he observed, computers and the Internet were becoming as commonplace as the telephone.

Not so at McDermitt Combined School. Located three hours northeast of Reno, smack in the middle of the desert on the Nevada-Oregon border, it was pretty much the town that the Internet forgot--or tried to. How could these kids compete, Goff wondered, if they had never built a Web site? If they have never used a search engine? If they have never even sent an email message?

Okay, the state provided some connection, but it was a perpetual bottleneck--too many schools and too few modems--and provided nowhere near the bandwidth necessary for meaningful instruction. In the end, he resorted to using an Internet provider in Idaho, but the long-distance charges added up, limiting the time online.

What he needed was an affordable, reliable, and fast connection. But the community didn't have local Internet access-- and for good reason: McDermitt (population: 756) isn't just out of the way, it's in the middle of the proverbial nowhere. McDermitt's few hundred households weren't enough to attract a provider to the area.

Enter ingenuity: with the help of school principal John Moddrell, Goff found a solution. McDermitt Combined could get high-speed service by connecting via satellite through Intellicom, a provider based in Livermore, California. Only, there was a catch: it would cost $1,900 a month, far exceeding Goff's budget.  However, if the school turned around and sold McDermitt residents access to its Internet connection, Goff could indeed afford the service.
Which is precisely what he and his students did. They formed McDermitt-Humboldt Internet Provider (M-HIP) and rounded up enough customers to cover expenses. Because M-HIP was a local call, unlimited Internet access was available to anyone in the northwestern corner of Nevada--as long as you had a phone and a computer.

That was almost three years ago. The result?

In some ways, McDermitt is far more up-to-date than it's ever: students are finally researching homework assignments and college scholarships online--Goff achieved his goal.

Also, parents are taking college courses online; farmers and ranchers are on the verge of selling hay and cattle online; and residents are sending email far and wide, reestablishing old connections and making new ones.

But in reality, the Internet hasn't transformed the town. Not yet anyway. McDermitt looks much the same as it has for years--like a former mining community that's seen better days. Rather than generating a tidal wave of changes, the Internet is making ripples--subtle changes in people's lives. The technology and its potential are spreading, but they're doing so gradually. Not everyone sees the possibilities and wants to change. After all, McDermitt got by without the Net for more than 100 years.

(This blog is an extraction and condensation of a longer article by Chuck Salter, which you can read in full at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/45/mcdermitt.html -- it's well worth reading).