"It will reach every address, every single address or you don't get any of it," said West Virginia Economic Development Secretary Mitch Carmichael. "This is a monumental leap forward to get every single address. And we're doing it post-haste. As fast as you can move it."
Carmichael was talking about broadband internet access in West Virginia, now that the state is able to draw down $1.2 billion in federal dollars to tackle the problem.
According to WV MetroNews, federal officials were baffled by the approach taken by the state Office of Broadband.
Evan Feinman, director of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program with the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications Administration, said the Mountain State "took a pretty unique approach that it took me a while to get my head all the way around -- target regions comprised of different sub-target areas and a really aggressive approach toward making sure low-income folks in West Virginia were going to be able to take service and afford it. ... So it really required a lot of thinking, hard work and late nights and a clear understanding that this was a shared endeavor."
It is refreshing to hear from someone at a federal agency who took the time and effort to listen to a West Virginia idea and figure out how to make it work. Credit surely goes in part to Kelly Workman, director of the state Office of Broadband, who is still cautious in her enthusiasm. She told WV MetroNews "With a $1.2 billion program, you can imagine that there must be a very detailed plan for execution. So the plan is approved. The second part of this is we have to detail the budget.
"There's a deployment phase. Once we ensure that we can reach all the unserved locations in West Virginia, we can move on to non-deployment activities. So, we've proposed some non-deployment activities related to workforce."
Good. It appears as though state and federal officials started this project with the determination to get it right for West Virginia. It won't happen overnight; and residents who know the terrain can be forgiven for wondering whether we really can get quality broadband internet access to every address. But the ball is rolling. Those who worked so hard to make it happen likely won't relax until the job is done, but the rest of us can offer congratulations on what seems to be a fantastic start.