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Nolin RECC
Opening a Community to the World
January 1997
The people and
businesses around Elizabethtown in central Kentucky are moving into
the information age, and they’re getting a lot of help from Nolin
Rural Electric Cooperative.
“We’re
helping people open the community up to the world,” says Mickey
Miller, president and CEO of Nolin, the consumer-owned electric
utility that serves nearly 24,000 meters in the seven counties
surrounding Elizabethtown.
What Nolin has
done is acquire the assets and assume the operation of a local “televillage”--a
kind of electronic bulletin board that had outgrown its ability to
be run by volunteers. Nolin’s involvement, through a subsidiary of
Nolin, will allow the televillage to expand, add new services, and
upgrade equipment, billing, staffing, and other essentials of a
well-run business.
“We have a good
reputation in the community,” says Miller. “Somebody would be
doing this eventually, but it would be much longer in coming. We can
bring strong expertise and credibility to this effort.”
For all the talk
about computers and telephone modems, most people don’t make much
use of the Internet--the worldwide network of computers linked
through phone lines. This is especially true in smaller communities
for a couple of reasons. In large cities, any number of services
provide access to the Internet through a local, toll-free phone
line. These are often not available in more rural communities, and
that’s important since it’s pretty easy to spend several hours a
week using the Internet, and that can mean prohibitive long-distance
phone bills.
Also, getting
connected and using the Internet requires some technical knowledge
that a lot of people don’t have. Training is essential.
Nolin is helping
on both fronts. The subsidiary, which expects to become
self-supporting once it gets well-established, will provide Internet
access for the cost of a local call. Nolin’s subsidiary is also
coordinating training sessions through a number of “sector
committees” set up by the televillage. These sector committees
cover education, agriculture, business, health, and government, to
name a few.
The Nolin
project, announced last month, charges $19.95 a month for local
access to the Internet and to something called KVNet, which is the
electronic bulletin board that offers information about local
activities. If you have a computer, modem, and an Internet provider
you can take a look at KVNet by typing in http://kvnet.org.
-Paul Wesslund |
