Ever since Beaufort County Community College in rural Washington, North Carolina, became its own institution in 1979, students have routinely driven up to 100 miles round trip – on dark, isolated two-way roads – to get to night classes.
Now it takes students like Willene Brinn, a business manager who used to drive 40 miles a day round trip from Belhaven, North Carolina, to Washington, all of five minutes.
No, the school hasn't moved to Belhaven, a town of 2,200 people with no college campus of its own. But the school's faculty can now hold classes anywhere thanks to a state-funded wireless Internet program.
While it's not uncommon for rural communities to tinker with Wi-Fi Internet access, Beaufort has taken Wi-Fi in a whole new direction: Rather than offer the service in a building, the school equipped a van with a satellite dish and 20 Wi-Fi-enabled laptop computers to bring the Internet to students.
"We have people who would have to take a ferry from the other side of the river," Brinn said. "Now this van goes to them."
Beaufort County Community College represents four counties – Beaufort, Hyde, Tyrrell and Washington – and an estimated 69,000 residents. The area is so vast and contains so many rivers that home Internet coverage is spotty, said Penny Sermons, director of the learning resources center at the college. Also, many residents of these counties are mill workers or unemployed people who can't afford computers at home, Sermons said.
In other words, offering courses only through the Internet so that people could stay home for class wouldn't work in this case. This is where the mobile van comes in.
The white Dodge Ram that has received a lot of attention and praise from local residents was funded by the North Carolina general assembly. An hour before each class, the van's technician, Chris Craddock, parks outside a designated building – most likely a local high school or community center – and sets up a classroom there. The 20 Dell laptop computers are powered by the van's satellite dish, making it unnecessary for the building to have a broadband pipeline. The system can temporarily run on its own even if there is a power failure in the building, said project engineer Whiting Toler.
Usually, it takes Craddock about an hour to clear away the equipment once the students are gone, Toler said.
"We could teach a four- to six-hour class without any electricity," he said. "We often joke that if we had to, we could teach Windows XP to a cave man. Hand him a notebook computer to do work, even if he did not have power."
The college uses the Wi-Fi-enabled van only for classes that require each student to have a computer, such as introduction to PowerPoint or, in Brinn's case, intro to Windows XP. Other classes are still held at the school's building in Washington.
The instructor teaches the course in whatever building is used to set up the mobile computer lab. As in a normal classroom setting, the instructor talks through exercises while students peck away on the borrowed laptops.
Beaufort's Wi-Fi trial comes as rural communities and government agencies continue to struggle to find ways to provide broadband Internet access to sparsely populated areas.
As an alternate route to broadband access, some towns outfit one building with a T1 line and then offer free Wi-Fi service to residents and visitors in the area. But again, this method requires users to tote around their own laptops or live close enough to the access point to receive service on their desktop computers.
The FCC is also mulling ways to bring broadband Internet access to rural America, including over power lines. However, power-line communication faces some technical hurdles: In order for it to work, power grids must be retrofitted with adapters that change data signals into frequencies that can be carried over electrical lines.
Maine is the only state in the country to offer all kindergarten to 12th-grade schools and public libraries Internet access, although some of the schools still rely on dialup connections. But at home, about half of Maine's residents with dialup Internet access can't get broadband. Maine's Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe has introduced legislation that would give telcos tax incentives to offer broadband to more residents in the state.
"(The mobile van) seems to be better than nothing," said Phil Lindley, an analyst in the finance division of the Maine Public Utilities Commission, of the Beaufort program. "But if that means they only got one van for the whole state, that's not much coverage."
For Brinn, who has taken classes at Beaufort County Community College for the last 15 years, the van's presence whittles her commute to three miles. Prior to July, when the school van first hit the road, she would drive for more than 30 minutes to get to an evening class and would not get home until after 10 p.m.
For Beaufort County Community College's continuing education department, which spearheaded this project, the van also means higher student enrollment.
"There are students taking classes that would not otherwise take them if it were not for this mobile van," said Dawn Pinkham, an instructor at the college. "The amazing thing about this van is that we can bring it to the population. We can bring it to the people."
