Communities in the Tri-State Appalachian region of Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee and North Georgia now have a fiber network worthy of any large metropolitan area in the world, thanks to a seven-year project just completed by BalsamWest FiberNET.

BalsamWest's backbone ring fiber forms the Western North Carolina Education Network (WNC-EdNET)

BalsamWest used state-of-the-art fiber optics from Corning and the latest electronics from Cisco networks to build a 300 mile backbone loop connecting local businesses, school districts and hospitals with a megapop in Marietta, Ga. that connects the rural area to the rest of the world. FiberNET is the end game for a trio of diverse users – The Eastern Band of Cherokees, Drake Enterprises and Southwestern Community College – that were tired of high prices, low bandwidth and sketchy service provided via a handoff between BellSouth and Verizon.

“It is not a diverse handoff,” said Sherry McCuller, CFO of BalsamWest. “When somebody had a backhoe on the side of the road, it had actually taken four counties down for 14 hours – landlines, cell phones, Internet, public safety.”

This did not sit well with the Cherokee tribe, which runs Harrah’s Casino in Cherokee, N.C. or Drake, one of the larger electronic tax filing companies in the nation. On top of that, the low level connectivity was slowing growth for the area which is located within a hour of major metro markets like Knoxville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Nashville and Greenville and making it difficult for school children in rural districts to take advantage of facilities such as the community college.

On the surface, the Tri-State Appalachian is not an area where one would expect a state-of-the-art fiber network. That, in part, is why the incumbents weren’t doing it and why BalsamWest was formed.

“We’re sort of an unusual company,” McCuller said. “We have a backbone ring that traverses the Southern Appalachian region and goes to every rural community of any size. It’s fiber because we want to offer the highest level of reliability. The investors are major electronic businesses.”

They also understand what other major businesses need and what it will take to draw them to the area.

“We can reach the end user through a variety of methods -- through wireless, through copper or through fiber directly into the premise,” she said. “All the schools being connected (with the Western North Carolina Ednet project) will have fiber directly into their building.”

Hospitals, one of which is actually acting as a network co-lo and among five rural carrier hotels BalsamWest has established, are also early adopters.

One rural hospital, McCuller said, needed to get radiology imaging to a centralized site 40 miles away. Because bandwidth was so expensive, the hospital would copy the radiology images to CD then drive them to the centralized site – from the emergency room.

“We connected three rural hospitals with the big regional hospital here and we cut their time from 30 minutes by car to 12 seconds and reduced their cost by 25 times,” McCuller said.

BalsamWest, she emphasized, doesn’t compete with local businesses. The network isn’t a service provider, it’s a wholesaler for those who would put their own services on it at a substantial cost savings over what was previously available and with an end result that’s unfamiliar to most rural areas.

“Drake and the Tribe’s vision for BalsamWest is to recreate these climates for doing business here,” she said. “We don’t want to give the impression that Tri-State Southern Appalachian is Appalachia. This area is going through a land boom that has not been seen since Florida was developed.”