Small Town Virginia

Sponsored by Old Dominion Electric Cooperative

GigaParks Position Virginia as No. 1 Southern State for Rural Broadband Development

By Mike Randle

Right after WW II, elected officials in states throughout the South spread the grand news about a new development idea. The idea was called "farm to market." From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Southern governments implemented this farm to market strategy as quickly as it could be built and paid for. It helped farmers get their products to market quicker by improving rural roads to at least a point where they were passable for much of the year.

Southern economic development veterans like Jack Hammontree in McMinn County, Tenn. called the farm to market initiative "shoot and chip." They would "shoot tar on the dirt roads in rural counties and drop gravel or other types of rock in it while it was still hot to create a hard surface" Hammontree said. "The new road worked pretty well, but it would get a little sticky in the summer time."

While the farm to market strategy helped farmers get their products out to buyers, the new roads created an unintended benefit for the rural South in general. As farmers were moving product out, owners of industry realized they could now get in to the South's rural areas and tap into a variety of things, namely natural resources, low cost land and hard working labor. While most Southern states at the time didn't think about industry discovering the benefits of a rural location as a result of "shoot and chip," that's exactly what happened.

The 21st century version of farm to market is no better seen than in Virginia where the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative recently celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2009. While there are still several Southern states that have a ways to go before broadband service is available to even the majority of rural towns and counties, the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative (MBC) has built and is operating an 800-mile-plus backbone fiber optic network throughout Southern Virginia. The open access fiber network, which was completed less than two years after breaking ground, offers business and industry in Southern Virginia true broadband connections to anywhere across the globe.

In fact, the network offers 400 gigabit-per-second speed with extremely low latency, direct connections through Richmond and McLean, Va. to the Equinix Internet Business Exchange (IBX) facility in Ashburn, Va., and through Raleigh and Charlotte to the TelX facility in Atlanta.

In 2009, MBC worked with the Virginia Tobacco Commission to launch the GigaPark branding initiative. The initiative identified more than 60 business and technology parks located throughout Southern Virginia that are connected to MBC's broadband network. These GigaPark locations provide users with high capacity and low costs, two key ingredients when companies are evaluating sites for development.

The GigaParks are located near major markets such as Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charlotte and the Research Triangle in Raleigh-Durham with easy access from I-95, I-85 and I-81. With over 60 to choose from, they come in virtually every variety including green-field sites, sites with speculative and other available buildings and master-planned sites. Data Center operations, advanced manufacturing, and logistics/distribution companies are locating in GigaParks and profiting from the low cost environment that exists in Southern Virginia.

Mark Heath, President and CEO of the Martinsville-Henry County EDC, said about the Virginia gigaparks, “We have three of them - more than 2000 acres of them. MAB is the best fiber backbone anywhere - rural or otherwise.”