WESTERN NC— Back in 2002, Drake Software, which files millions of taxpayer returns electronically every year, had eight outages in Western NC. “We could not afford to be down,” says David Hubbs, of Internet Services for Drake, “so we had two choices. Build something to get redundancy or move.”

“We were getting service from two different providers in two different cities, but they both came into the region through the same pipe,” says Hubbs. “One time we lost all contact for eight hours.” Drake approached its carrier, but they were not prepared to make the kind of investment necessary to improve connectivity in the region.

Drake along with the Eastern band of the Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, NC, decided to build a network themselves. They formed BalsamWest FiberNET and created a 300-mile underground fiber network built for carrier grade service now connecting Western NC, Northern Georgia, and Eastern Tennessee.

Cecil Groves, president of Southwestern Community College and an architect and key advocate of the BalsamWest venture explains that they built the network underground to preserve the aesthetics of the region.

After a detailed study funded with $1.4 million from a regional commission, the project got underway. The Cherokee tribe had problems similar to Drake’s—they did not want their casinos connectivity lost and they needed better connections to improve economic development opportunities in the region. So they teamed on the project.

Getting the job done was not as simple as just deciding to do it, however. Some critics said building an underground fiber network through the rugged Appalachian mountain region would be impossible or prohibitively expensive. Venture backing, for instance, “was off the table” because it was tough to make a good business case for building the network in an area with about 40 persons per square mile (as opposed to the typical 150 per square mile in the rest of NC).

“We were told we couldn’t possibly do it though the mountains,” says Groves. “We just wouldn’t be able to afford it. Then once we got that done, people said we wouldn’t be able to operate it because it was too complex technically. Then their was the question of how to get a private entity to work with the Cherokees, a sovereign nation. People said ‘you’ll never get through the legal entanglements.’ But we put together an agreement to make it work.”

In 2003, construction began with an investment of more than $16 million, including $6 million in public and private grants. In 2006 they lit the fiber, delivering top quality high speed service to colleges, schools, hospitals and healthcare providers and businesses. This year the fiber optic network was directly connected to the Atlanta Internet backbone, the third largest Internet backbone in the nation.

Groves points out that the network has the added benefit of keeping the money spent on it and for its service in the region and is expected to help stimulate economic development throughout the largely rural area.