From the perspective of Aaron Brill, manager of the Silverton Mountain Ski Area, the digital divide in rural Colorado is 16 miles wide the distance between his office and Cascade Village at Durango Mountain Resort.
Qwest Communication International’s nearest fiber-optic cable dead-ends in Cascade Village, and an antiquated microwave linkup connects Silverton, the county seat of San Juan County, with the Internet and the outside world. The lack of reliable, high-speed Internet access in Silverton “cuts down on the efficiency of everything we do,” says Brill from processing online reservations to uploading marketing materials.
“It makes things that are simple in the real world very difficult here,” he said. “We can’t even have a Webcam.”
And if an avalanche were to take out a relay tower as one did in early 2005 no telecommunications can make it in or out of Silverton at all: no calls on cell phones or land lines, no faxes, e-mails, credit-card transactions, nothing.
“We only had dial-up Internet access here until two years ago,” says Patrick Swonger, a Silverton town trustee and the owner of Vidion, an IT consulting firm in the 350-resident town. “I’d venture to say we’re the most isolated county seat in Colorado.”
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