Going the last mile for rural Mississippi

Add Richard Howorth, mayor of Oxford, Mississippi, to the list of local leaders working to expand high speed internet access to their communities. He is developing a pilot project which would unite his city and nearby rural areas in an effort to connect to fiber internet connections.

"Obviously in communities that do not have the numbers to bring in broadband high-speed Internet access," he said, "there is a way by cooperating on a local or regional basis in sharing all of our Internet and telecom capacities that we create a more open access, allowing more people to use it."

Since market forces alone have not brought high speed internet access to much of rural America, partnerships among these communities has proven to be an effective method for expanding access.

Northeast Mississippi has an advantage in its quest for universal high speed internet access. A fiber optic ring is already in place there, stretching 833 miles through Oxford, Tupelo, Starkville, Columbus, Jackson and then up into Memphis, Tennessee. This infrastructure was built over the past two years by MEGAPOP, the Mississippi Economic Growth Alliance and Point of Presence.

MEGAPOP is an alliance of business leaders, university presidents, economic developers, government officials, and other interested parties, whose goal is to develop last-mile high speed internet access in rural Mississippi, which would actually bring the technology to people's homes.

Among the benefits they describe are the savings towns would see from controlling their utilities with a high speed network:

If a city's power company wired every house on its grid, it could read meters and generate bills through the fiber optic access instead of using meter readers and clerks…

Similarly, the power company could switch off a water heater not in use during peak hours of the day, saving energy on the grid for industrial use. At night, the process would reverse when, theoretically more people returned home.

This would be in addition to other benefits rural residents would enjoy, from telemedicine to education to emergency services. Mayor Howorth clearly understands this, and he's working to make it happen.

New ways on the way to develop region's Internet access (The Daily Journal)

Mississippi Economic Growth Alliance and Point of Presence