When residents in Silver Springs want to make a phone call to Yerington on the other side of the Carson River, they don’t just pick up their phone and dial. They don’t even want to pick up the hone and dial “1+.” Instead, most of the time they use their cell phones to make any kind of long distance calls to avoid high use charges.
The Carson River running through Lyon County divides the county into two, and also divides telephone service between Nevada Bell and GTE. Everybody in the northern half of the county, which is growing quickly, has to make a long distance call to the county seat in order to do business. As a result, the county installed foreign exchange lines that are Silver Springs numbers. When a resident dials a Silver Springs number it’s forwarded to Yerlington so that everyone in the Dayton corridor up the Fernley can call and conduct business.
Sound confusing? It is. Attempting to fix the problem has been worse, according to John Holmes, who is working with the Lyon County Economic Development Authority (LCEDA) and county commissioners to resolve the phone service issue.
Desperately Seeking Service
When GTE came in and took over for the previous carrier, Holmes warned residents who had complained of the previous carrier, “You’re going to wish for the good old days once GTE is in. You can pick up a pay phone in Yerington, hit ‘0’ for operator and the operator comes on in Los Angeles from GTE and you tell him or her where you are. I’ve had operators say, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve that area,’ and I’ve had to say, ‘I know you don’t, but we’re trying to change that.”
Change never comes easily, however. Holmes went to the Public Utilities Commission, which ordered a study. The study came back reporting the long distance calling between the two areas wasn’t significant. “I said, ‘Really? Did you query the cell phone operators?’ Well no. You know how I call Yerington? I call it on my cell phone because it’s free. Everybody out here knows that when you call back and forth you call on a cell phone. Otherwise I pay 90cents [a minute] or something god-awful like that.” Second, Holmes asked if the study had taken the numerous trunk lines that feed between Silver Springs and Yerington to handle all the north/south county business into account. It hadn’t. “So is essence you’ve done a study that tells you absolutely nothing, because everybody that lives out here know the last thing you do is dial 1+,” Holmes said.
His next step took him to the major carriers, offering to have the county sign a long-term contract with a carrier that would not only supply service, but finally tie the two halves of the county together. The companies were interested, excited even, but each time he was working the wrong employees. By the time he go to the management levels that could approve a contract, “They were doing multi-billion dollar mergers overseas and most of them couldn’t pinpoint where Nevada was, let alone Lyon County, so that fell flat.”
At that point Holmes stopped looking big, and started looking small. He found a company in California and ended up talking to the owner, the person who actually makes the decisions. It’s a small company, but it offers a variety of services. “It’s a slow process,” he says, but things are finally moving forward.
Meanwhile phone service isn’t the only concern in Lyon County. The county only recently received an AOL access number to avoid long distance calls to Reno to go online, and area residents and businesspeople are looking to upgrade their Internet services. “When we talk to companies [looking to move into the area], they have a laundry list:’ Holmes stated. “They go through the taxes and the work force, and one of the top 10 things on laundry lists now is telecommunications. Businesses want to know, ‘What kind of service do you have there, what kind of switch is servicing this area, can I get wide band data service, can I do all these things?’ When somebody asks us those questions, I have to tell them that if they’re in the northern half they’re going to get a whole lot better service than in the southern half. That’s the reason Dayton and Femley have booming industrial parks. Occasionally, they get another small company down in Yerington, but almost anything businesses want in terms of telecommunications will cost a lot more money and be a lot more difficult.”
Lest the picture be formed that everything in the rural counties is impossible when it comes to telecommunicating with the rest of the world, John Sanderson, LCEDA executive director, notes that high-speed digital subscriber lines (DSL) are available in some areas of the county already and heading for more. There’s a communications committee working to bring the system into the southern part of the county, hooking up through a connection with Nevada Bell, a project that has been in the works for about a year.
What regional business leaders want is high-speed Internet access in more areas. “High-speed telecommunications puts us on a level playing field with the urban areas,” says Sanderson. “Our advantages [in attracting new companies] include land cost, the ease of doing business and the cost of living. An employee can live in Fernley for $10,000 or $15,000 less [annually] than in a big city, and that’s an advantage to the company.” High-speed capability gives firms additional advantages.
Compare Lyon County to Churchill County and the picture changes completely. According to Shirley Walker, executive director of the Churchill Economic Development Authority (CEDA), the Churchill County Telephone Company, the only county-owned telephone company in the U.S., is cutting edge. Churchill County Telephone has been in business since 1889; its annual profit (approximately $1.3 million) makes up 15 percent of the county’s general fund. “[Churchill County Telephone puts] a lot of money into telecommunications, and can compete well with any company. It spends well over $1 million [annually] with all the local businesses, it’s constantly adding money to ‘upgrade improvements, and its profits in the last year were up 15 percent. That gives you an idea of how we are growing and what we can provide the community?’ Churchill County Telephone is currently working with a Reno-based Internet service provider, SourceNet, to engineer a network that can deliver high-speed Internet access, phone service, broadcast and cable programming and video-on-demand services, all over standard telephone lines utilizing DSL technology.
But is the Internet crunch really being felt in counties where high-speed Internet access and fiber optic technology are not available? Yes. In Ely, small businesses are feeling the impact of local consumers buying over the Internet. “We were fairly skeptical that it would happen:’ says Karen Rajala, of the White Pine Economic Diversification Council (WPEDC). “But the owner of the tire store now finds he must compete with people buying over the Internet. The local furniture store is finding some of its customers buying directly over the Internet, and how do you service that once it’s here? Those are issues concerning our local businesses. We’re trying to help them make that into an opportunity, to turn the tables and offer their products and services over the Internet to draw new business.”
But the region is hampered by a lack of high-speed capability or fiber optics, which also slows down White Pine County’s economic expansion. “We don’t have fiber optics here yet, so we don’t have the speed and the volume capacity for some of the call center-type or Internet and telecommunications oriented businesses to locate here:’ says Rajala. It will be one to two years before fiber optics makes its way into White Pine county and it’s a critical need, Rajala believes. “In the past we were concerned with water, sewers and streets. They’re still a concern, but now we have realized we’ve got to focus on getting our telecommunications capacity up to speed. For a rural area such as ours where we do not have direct access to an interstate [highway], if we do not have telecommunications capacity we’re going to have a difficult time attracting new firms.”
The areas up to speed in the rural counties often include services such as education and medicine.
Tele- Medicine
While the colleges often have telecommunications systems in place, so does medicine. “In the medical field we are also seeing things move along pretty well:’ says Rajala. “People are being well trained in the tele-medicine link and are stepping up to the plate with what’s being provided. It’s important to our area for economic development as well because one question asked quite often is ‘What are your medical services, and your access to special medical services?”
Tele-medicine, says Gerald Ackerman, director of Nevada Area Health Education Centers and faculty with the School of Medicine at University of Nevada, Reno, is the sharing of information that allows a physician to make a diagnosis, consult with a specialist or take continuing education programs. It entails anything from a diagnostic consultation with a family doctor and a cardiologist to the cardiologist teaching in rural areas without ever leaving home. Currently there are units, both urban and rural, located at Washoe Medical Center and the main medical school campus, with rural units up and running in Lovelock, Winnemuca, Elko, Ely, Hawthorne and Yerington. Eureka is due to come online and units are proposed for Battle Mountain and Churchill Community Hospital.
The technology involves two-way compressed video, patient exam cameras, ear nose and throat scopes, digital Dolby stethoscopes and VCR document cameras, and offers physicians a range of consults from Alzheimer’s, neurology clinics, pediatric behavioral, cardiology and psychiatry. “We’ve been able to pipe out all kinds of continuing education and continuing medical education courses,” says Ackerman. “We worked with Washoe Health System on their trauma rounds and nursing education.”
Tele-Education
While the counties wait for fiber optics and high-speed Internet, the schools across the state are moving ahead. “We did a survey and found that we had more interactive video on a per population basis than any other area in the state,” says Ten Williams, executive director of the Tn-County Development Authority, which encompasses Humboldt and Lander counties, Winnemucca, McDermitt, Battle Mountain and Austin. “Our colleges are using interactive video. Just recently, Great Basin College began offering a four-year program in elementary education. I think what we’re going to be seeing as years go by are many more similar program opportunities. Our college has been a very small community college, but it’s well attended and has a considerable amount of FTE (full time equivalent) students. I see more programs being offered at community college and educational opportunities being offered though universities such as University of Phoenix,” Williams observed.
“Western Nevada Community College, part of the University and Community College System, plays a great part because companies do take advantage of the classes they offer. Colleges can design classes compatible with the needs of business,” says Shirley Walker. “It’s a very important role, and in Nevada having an educated work force that will stay in Nevada is probably our greatest need. Some of the things the state has done are extremely important as far as keeping students at home in the north and south, encouraging them to get their education at home and stay in the state.”
What’s There, What’s Not
The need for new services involves the need for new facilities. “Putting in fiber between Silver Springs and Yerington along 95A is a very expensive thing to do,” says John Holmes. “There is some fiber heading that way, but it’s headed for bigger and better things, it cuts off and goes to Schurz, and it’s interstate stuff. Nobody lives between Yerington and Silver Springs and when you get to the end of that chain there’s not a whole lot of people in either of those places. To plough through rock — and that’s what you have to do — makes it a very expensive operation. You don’t have a San Francisco or Los Angeles at either end, which is what you need because fiber is capable of [handling] such a huge amount of traffic.”
Still, it’s coming, following the railroad and 1-80 and reaching out to draw rural counties into the web. According to Dick Bostdorf, vice president and general manager of Nevada Bell, the rural counties have every service the metro areas have except DSL, which is not capable of handling long distance at this time. Fiber optics are coming, but it’s a gradual process. There are relay services in locations such as Pahrump and Winnemucca; those locations have everything Reno has except DSL. Recently Nevada Bell upgraded all of its switches and put in the newest, most modern switches they could. “The plan is for 80 percent of [Nevada Bell] customers to have [DSL] in the next three years,” says Bostdorf. “Our goal is to provide broadband service to all customers, but it’s a gradual process.”
A process rural counties are eager to see completed.
