Telecommunications upgrade is key to coast economic growth

As rural electrification and the railroad were to the development of the early American West, the spread of telecommunications technology will be the key to the economic development of the West of the future, including the Oregon coast, says Onno Husing, director of the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association (OCZMA). His organization is now spearheading a coast-wide effort to bring the most advanced telecommunications to the coast.

All-season business
The conversion of coastal businesses from seasonal to year-round has been a goal - and a struggle - for many in Lincoln County. Prompted by that reality, some businesses on the coast are already adapting to the new globalized world through the use of telecommunications. For example, Husing points out, the Lighthouse Deli, run by Jim Iverson, "has a big Internet business" that enables the South Beach food shop to reach customers around the country in all seasons.

"Seventy percent of his business in winter now is through Internet sales. I came with Jim one day at 6 a.m. to watch him turn on the computer to see what his Internet orders were overnight. He's on Yahoo and eBay and he's all self-taught. It's a whole new world out there."

The Lincoln County Economic Development Alliance, working with county government and organizations like Husing's, took the lead several years ago in the first coordinated effort at bringing telecommunications technology to the Oregon coast, with the creation of CoastNet. That linked Lincoln County with the Willamette Valley, and through the Bonneville Power Administration's regional telecommunications system, the world, by leasing space on otherwise unused fiber optic cables owned by the Central Lincoln People's Utility District. And it ultimately prompted Qwest, which had viewed the coast as a backwater, to come in with its own fiber optics system.

But the world, and especially, telecommunications, moves on. In order to provide more advanced, faster and greater capacities, the OCZMA, based in Newport, has been looking into a telecommunications project for the entire coast. "The coast as a whole is a poor region," says Husing, "and we really need a way to bring new businesses and new jobs here. The new telecommunications technologies could be that."

The need
That project, says Husing, is looking at two forms of enhanced technology: broadband cable, and wireless (also known as "Wi-Fi") technology.
Broadband cable is essentially just that, a larger fiber optic cable capable of carrying telecommunications services that demand a far higher number of bits per second than the more common current technology can handle. Thus, where the modem in most computers today can transfer data at a rate of 56 kilobytes (KB) per second, large deployments of broadband capability now enable the transfer of 500 KB per second or more -10 times what the average home computer, or its telephone line, can handle
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Husing's OCZMA "started in on this in earnest in February 2004, and we'll have a final report out September 30," he said. "The point is that we've got issues of poverty all up and down the Oregon coast, and many of the people I work for - the counties, cities, ports, soil and water conservation districts, as well as the Coquille Tribe - all recognize we have these issues. The data shows, for instance, that 70 percent of the kids in Waldport qualify for the school lunch program."

Many of the best and brightest among the coast's young people go inland to college and stay there after they graduate, even as senior citizens come to the coast to retire. Others come to build "trophy homes" which give the coast a "veneer of prosperity," Husing says, but are lived in only two months of the year, or are rented out, providing rental income to absentee owners far from the coastal economy.

These demographic changes are layered on top of the job losses the coast has sustained in the past decade to produce a sluggish economy. Here on the coast, Husing noted, the spotted owl crisis and its cut in timber harvests was followed by the endangered species listing of the salmon and then massive reductions in permitted catch for the groundfish. All these have made a coast-wide economic development, or redevelopment, strategy imperative, Husing says.

The opportunity
"With broadband, we have an opportunity to grow our existing businesses and to attract knowledge-based businesses from around the state, the region and the country, to the Oregon coast. We could see an increasing presence for cottage industries, businesses involved in intellectual property, and a variety of other kinds of businesses that want a high quality of life, and, due to the telecommunications revolution, no longer require being in an urban area."

One thing the coast does have is five community colleges, including the Oregon Coast Community College, here in Lincoln County. These colleges, Husing says, have "key roles to play in skills training, and in other regards, for this new technology."

And the central coast has several individuals who are at the top of their respective fields in new technology. The OCZMA technical team includes Dr. Edwin Parker, who literally wrote the book on the new telecommunications, and Ben Doti, who worked for years with the PUD telecommunications system and is now a telecommunications consultant. Also on that tech team are John Irwin, a telecommunications consultant from Southern Oregon, and Chris Tamarin, a technical expert with the Oregon Economic and Community Development Department.

Husing says the project is intended to "create a new sector of our economy, or rather, expand it, because it's already happening now. We do see a lot of small and family businesses on the Oregon coast, quietly making a living out of small offices or from home offices, doing businesses with people literally around the world. They can do that because of broadband and because of the Internet.

"We will encourage more of those businesses," he says. "If we have adequate broadband, we can attract businesses, we can market the Oregon coast, not just as a nice place to visit, but as a place where those firms want to work in, do business in, and live in."

He emphasizes that "we are not talking about putting a big (computer) chip plant here, but about putting a think tank that designs new programs here."

The technologies
Broadband involves having "a big enough pipe," Husing explains, to push he volumes of data through. "It's like the difference between a garden hose you wash your car with and a fireman's fire hose," Husing says.
Current technology, without broadband, is usually limited to the 56 KB per second standard of most modems. "You can't do teleconferencing, or transfer video, with that technology," he says. Even DSL (digital subscriber line) can't really match broadband, Husing explained.

Sprint in Lincoln City offers DSL, and he said, "it's kind of broadband." But that phone company's network still largely uses a copper-based wire network that was originally "designed for analog uses, like your old TV set." And copper has its limits as to how well it can carry digital information, and in the amount of data it can handle.

Broadband is not, in this age of exponentially expanding technologies, the end-all and be-all of the telecommunications revolution. The next big thing is Wi-Fi - and OCZMA is looking at it, too.

An Internet café, a town, city, or perhaps even a whole region like the Oregon coast can become a "Wi-Fi hotspot" in which a person with a laptop and the right chip from Intel can hook up into the Internet anywhere, without plugging into anything.

"It's like using a cell phone, which produces a cloud of signal that is portable. Wi-Fi produces a cloud of signal and if you're within it, you can access the Internet through it," he explained

OCZMA is not the only governmental entity in the country looking at enveloping an area in such a cloud. According to a recent issue of Business Week, EarthLink and Hewlett-Packard are now competing to build a 135-square mile citywide network for Philadelphia and its 1.5 million people, at less than $20 a month and just $10 a month to low-income residents. Minneapolis is taking bids for a 59-square mile citywide Wi-Fi and fiber network. Here in Oregon, adds Husing, the city of Keizer has its own Wi-Fi deployment process, and the City of Seattle is placing a Wi-Fi beacon on its famous Space Needle.

"It will be a public-private partnership. We'll be working with the private sector, and with the cities and counties to identify what added infrastructure people would like to have in their community," Husing says. "We'll ask interested communities to establish their own telecommunications committees; Lincoln County has one already, and Florence is roaring ahead, they started in 2002-03."