While others preen, Wilson supplies service

Today's News & Observer leads with a story about area cities "preening" for attention from Google, which has announced a pilot program to wire one community for high-speed, fiber-optic Internet connections. It will be a demonstration project to show what high-speed connections can mean for a community.

Notice the sidebar to the story: "Wired Wilson." Wilson, unlike its neighbor Rocky Mount and thousands of other cities across the country, is not vying for Google's favor. Wilson already has the high-speed connection that Google is offering to one lucky community, to be named later. Wilson City Council took a $28 million gamble on a plan to connect the entire city with fiber-optic cables, offering Internet speeds of up to one gigabit per second. That's the speed Google is proposing. According to today's story, 20 percent of city residents have already signed up, well on the way toward the city's goal of 30 percent connectivity by the end of next year.

Wilson has received some statewide notice for its foresighted venture into fiber, and it has received a lot of grief from the existing Internet providers who don't want competition from a municipal government. Legislative efforts promoted by these legacy cable suppliers to prohibit cities from offering this service have thus far failed. I signed up for Wilson's Greenlight service and have been pleased with it. My major motivation was saving money. By bundling Greenlight's Internet, cable and phone services, we are saving about $40 a month compared to our previous expenses with separate phone and cable/Internet service. The download speeds with Greenlight's basic service are noticeably faster than before, even with our computers, which would be considered antiquated by technophiles' standards.

But the big advantage to Wilson in Greenlight is not found among typical residential customers like me. Rather, the advantage is to business applications and technical uses. BB&T, for example, can use this ultra-high-speed service to upload/downloads tons of data from its financial transaction processing operations. A computer software or graphics business would find this service appealing, even essential. City officials, parrying criticism from the corporate competitors, contend that information transfer is a public utility, like water, sewer, electricity and natural gas, which many cities have provided for decades.

So while other cities hopefully cross their fingers for Google's selection, Wilson already has what the others desire.