Blacksburg Case Study
Blacksburg was not studied as part of 'Getting Rural Virginia Connected.' However, Blacksburg's community network, Blacksburg Electronic Village, formed the conceptual and physical model this project was based on. This document contains some highlights of that model and what we tried to accomplish in participating counties.
Goals of Blacksburg Electronic Village
BEV is an outreach effort of Virginia Tech, one of two land grant public universities in Virginia. BEV is based entirely on the Internet. Our goals are:
- Support and extend the virtual community in Blacksburg to complement and enhance the physical community.
- Research, develop, and refine models for sustainable community-wide networks.
- Promote the use of advanced network technology for local governance, business, and residential use.
- Provide support and assistance to other Virginia communities that are developing community-wide networks
BEV Milestones
Blacksburg has broken new ground in many areas of networking and technology use. Some examples include:
- Highest per capita use of Internet in the world, with more than 87% of Blacksburg residents online and an estimated 60% of the community using broadband (typically 10 megabit Ethernet or better) services at home, at work, or both.
- First town in the world to adopt an all-Internet model for a community-wide network
- First community in the US to offer residential Ethernet service as an amentiy in apartments and townhomes.
- First county in the US to have every school directly connected to the Internet. In Montgomery County today, every classroom in every school has direct, high speed Internet access.
- Blacksburg has the highest per capita availability of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in the world, with more than a dozen local and national providers offering modem and dedicated access, including cable modem, ISDN, and DSL services.
- Highest business use of the internet of any community in the world, with more than 75% of Blacksburg businesses using the Internet for commerce and advertising. Nearly 500 local businesses have listings on the BEV Village Mall.
- First community-managed MSAP (Multimedia Services Access Point), providing the information for very high bandwidth applications in the community.
- First community to have operations high bandwidth LMDS wireless links.
"The Very First Steps"
Create a community website.
Provide web hosting for community and civic groups.
These two services are within the reach of every community, no matter how small. Creating a public space in cyberspace for the community is critical to begin a community dialogue on the next steps.- From BEV Community Network Briefing Book, 2001
These were two key elements of Getting Rural Virginia Connected.