A crowd of 300 people, including Hayden Rogers, chief of staff for Congressman Heath Shuler, and Jo Anne Sanford, former chairman of the N.C. Utilities Committee, gathered at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino on Friday, March 9, to celebrate the official opening of BalsamWest’s $14 million, 300-mile fiber-optic network that runs through six Western North Carolina counties.

“They said it can’t be done –you can’t build a fiber-optic backbone through the mountains,” said Cecil Groves, president of Southwestern Community College, which is one of the project’s sponsors.

“It was built by a local company, with local labor, and will be locally funded as well as operated,” he said.

The project is the result of a partnership between SCC, Drake Enterprises, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians that formed Balsam-West FiberNET in 2003 to develop the new telecommunications infrastructure. The fiber-optic network will allow businesses, schools and health care facilities to use high-capacity communication services, some even more advanced than what is found in the country’s largest cities, Groves said. The network has a bandwidth of one gigabyte per second.

“People will look at us and say, “Wow! What a model! That makes me proud,” said Michell Hicks, principal chief of the EBCI.

“There will be nothing like it on the planet.” Agreed Drake Enterprises founder Phil Drake.

Groves told the crowd that the combination of private enterprise, local government and public education had formed a partnership that makes WNC a “frontrunner in technological innovation.”

“When public good can be served through a private sustainable endeavor, you have the best of both worlds.” he said.

He stressed that public access to quality education and training is essential to the continued economic strength and security of our nation.

Groves cited access to revolutionary tools and resources, such as virtual field trips, learning simulation exercises, expanded home-based and work-based learning opportunities, and constant access to knowledge as educational benefits of the system.

“Let the call go out,” said David Hubbs, vice chairman of BalsamWest. “Western North Carolina is now on the global telecommunications map.”

Caption under Picture:
Drake Enterprises CEO Tim Hubbs, left, and Jim Campbell, vice president for information technology and telecommunications at Southern Community College, look over displays before a March 9 celebration at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino to honor BalsamWest’s completion of its 300-mile fiber-optic network. Drake, SCC and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians partnered on the $14 million project, which connects a six county region in Western North Carolina to larger cities and will allow high-capacity technologies to be used in businesses, schools and healthcare facilities.