ASHEVILLE — Cars rush along the interstates between Asheville and Atlanta in a matter of hours, but that’s a snail’s pace in the information economy when data is needed in less than a second. Now, thanks to a huge new fiber-optic pipeline, Atlanta will be only an instant away from Asheville. Netriplex Corp., in cooperation with AT&T, announced last week that the company will bring the largest broadband line ever into the Asheville area, building its own dedicated line to downtown Atlanta by the end of the year.

The project will benefit not only Netriplex, but also other local businesses that may want to pay to use the lightning-quick connection.

“Getting this size of pipe into our Asheville data center makes it equal in connectivity to our locations in Boston and Atlanta,” said Jonathan Hoppe, the company’s chief technology officer.

After only about a year operating in Biltmore Park, Netriplex had outgrown its existing broadband connection.

The firm needed more firepower to move backup data needed by its largest clients, Hoppe said. The company provides remote data backup, anti-spam technology and other services, with data centers in Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle and London.

Hoppe said the new line would be an OC-192 optical fiber, which can carry up to 10 gigabits per second of data. “That’s like downloading 10 copies of the Library of Congress, or the equal of 7,000 T1 lines with the capacity to serve 25,000 average businesses,” he said.

Business leaders have long been anticipating the technological link for the area.

“This is big,” said Jack Cecil, president of Biltmore Farms, the developer of Biltmore Park, Netriplex’s Asheville home. “We are going to literally be in downtown Atlanta without 3 1/2 hours of travel. We’ve been working on that for years.”

“Netriplex will now be able to bring world-class high reliability and high-security data services to companies in the Asheville area,” Cecil added.

While Netriplex will use the dedicated line to meet the needs of its clients around the world, the company could work with other Asheville firms to share some of the capacity, Hoppe said. “There are local Internet service providers who may need good bandwidth, and they can buy that through us, but we’re not going to be trying to sell T1 lines to local businesses,” he said.

Hunter Goosmann, general manager of the ERC Broadband in downtown Asheville, is happy to see more Internet access for local businesses. As a nonprofit, the ERC Broadband has an OC-48 fiber backbone, which can feed about 2.5 gigabytes per second into schools, governments, hospitals, universities and smaller businesses. “Netriplex’s success underscores the region’s technology growth and complements ERC Broadbrand’s efforts significantly,” he said.

With the increased connections, the key for the region will be using that Internet capacity to its fullest, Goosmann said.

“We need to make sure the greatest uses aren’t just for gaming or for watching movies,” he said. “We need to apply it in a business sense and educational sense, developing significantly more opportunities.”

Local effect

More households across Western North Carolina can plug into fast Internet service after years of limited access, a new state report shows, but rural areas still lag behind urban areas for broadband availability. “Major deployment in urban communities is more or less done – what we are now trying to push for is broadband expansion into the most underserved areas of our state, which are often rural and economically disadvantaged,” said Jane Smith Patterson, executive director of the e-NC Authority, which issued the report.

“Dial-up won’t cut it anymore – plain and simple. If broadband connectivity levels in this many homes, schools and businesses is so inadequate, we can’t expect companies to thrive and remain competitive, or that our rural children will have a chance to learn the latest technologies.”

Transylvania County ranks third in connectivity among the state’s rural counties with 96.42 percent of homes able to get either cable or DSL service.

Some counties actually saw their broadband connectivity decrease since 2002 as more developments are built in rural areas beyond the existing reach of cable or DSL service, explained Cary Edgar, a spokeswoman for the e-NC. The report doesn’t cover wireless or satellite providers.

One such county was Buncombe, which had a 77.37 percent broadband penetration in 2006, down from 87.20 percent in 2002. Henderson County saw its broadband availability grow from 68.42 percent in 2002 to 74.16 percent last year.

The e-NC Authority was created by the General Assembly to bring broadband technologies to all areas of the state. Statewide, broadband penetration is 83.54 percent.

Counties such as Graham, Swain and Clay have gone from zero access in 2002 to more than half of their households having access, largely thanks to the BalsamWest Fibernet.

BalsamWest boasts a blazingly fast OC-192 pipeline funded by $14 million from Drake Enterprises, a software company in Franklin, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

“It’s considered a next-generation type network that will give people a lot of connectivity that’s going to carry them forward for the next 10 to 15 years,” said Ron Massingale, BalsamWest’s director of sales and marketing.