Aberdeen: Building Its Own
On-Ramp to the Information Superhighway
Aberdeen, South Dakota
When federal planners laid out the interstate highway system, they passed by Aberdeen, South Dakota, in favor of more heavily populated areas. Aberdeen is determined to avoid repeating that experience as the Information Superhighway gets built.
A city of 25,000 in the sparsely-populated northeastern corner of South Dakota, Aberdeen has spearheaded a regional telecommunications project designed to tie its region together and link it to the outside world. Dakota Interconnect, as the project is known, already has met with some success: the first two-way interactive video transmission ever made from the U.S. Senate's television studio in Washington, DC, linked federal officials with people in Aberdeen over the new system.
Connecting Small Town Comfort with Big City Opportunities
"What are the chances of getting a high-level public servant or government official to fly into Aberdeen to give a presentation?" asks Aberdeen Mayor Tom Rich. Before Aberdeen had its high- speed communications links, people in the region had a much harder time contacting distant decision-makers. But now, they can. As Rich sees it, they can also work for anybody in the nation. Companies interested in taking advantage of the small-town comforts of places like Aberdeen can locate branch facilities there, knowing that they can easily communicate with their home offices. And employers can use teleconferencing to provide employee training that otherwise might be logistically difficult or prohibitively expensive.
These are significant new opportunities for the economically troubled, 12-county region surrounding Aberdeen. The region's population has declined sharply over the last two decades; in the 1980s, outmigration totaled 14 per cent, double the rate for the rest of South Dakota. Agricultural mechanization has led to a sharp decline in the number of farms. And even though farm sizes have increased, farm incomes have decreased and many farm families need other jobs to make ends meet.
Rural America Gets on the Information Superhighway
Building an on-ramp to the Information Superhighway is not cheap; Aberdeen relied on TIIAP for $900,000 of Dakota Interconnect's $2.4 million price tag. As Aberdeen demonstrated, however, rural communities eager to build their own electronic on-ramps do not have to start from scratch. Many already have at least some of the pieces needed to build their own information infrastructure.
When Aberdeen launched its project, for instance, the city already had CityNet, a fiber optic network that local government and educational institutions used to exchange data. A group of eight school districts in a three-county, 3,200-square-mile area operated North Central Area Interconnect, a distance-learning project that uses microwave technology. Aberdeen's own Northern State University was connected to the Rural Development Telecommunications Network, a statewide system linking colleges and universities.
Dakota Interconnect tied these previously separate networks together and helped them forge links to the Internet. At the same time, numerous partners joined a cooperative effort to build out the system. The city of Aberdeen, the local county government, and the local library all established studios for teleconferencing. Midcontinent Cable, a privately-owned cable-television system that operates CityNet, started offering residential customers high-speed Internet access via cable modem. Northern Rural Cable TV, which serves rural areas around Aberdeen, similarly agreed to offer its customers Internet access over its wireless system. The Aberdeen Development Corporation, a non- profit economic development enterprise, built a "Smart Connections Center" to serve as a telecommunications hub for small businesses.
At least 15 different partners joined in the effort, which is already bearing fruit. Presentation College in Aberdeen, for instance, is using the system to offer nursing classes at its satellite campus on an Indian reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, some 150 miles to the west. The South Dakota Student Loan Corporation, a nonprofit agency, joined CityNet and now uses the system to exchange data and confer with the State Department of Education in the state capital, Pierre. St. Luke's Midland Regional Medical Center has assembled a dozen health-care providers to use the system for remote medical consultations. And the Smart Center already has attracted a tenant: Vallon Inc., a Minneapolis software development company that designs web pages.
Pulling the disparate partners together and melding the different technologies into a single system was no easy task. "We held a lot of meetings and did a lot of hand-holding to get people to buy in totally for the benefit of the whole," says Mayor Rich. In the end, he says, each partner recognized that a well-developed information network would be worth much more to everybody than the sum of its parts.
"If we're going to survive economically, if we're going to give our children the advantages of small-town life rather than see them all move away, we've got to attract industries that use high- tech, rapid audio and visual data transmission," says Mayor Rich.
Tom Rich
Mayor
(605) 626-7025
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications
Last Modified: 18 Dec 97