By Lisa Garcia
There are mountains to climb to bring technology to rugged Southwest Virginia, says Nicole Sikora, director of the Southwestern Virginia Technology Council. But the region — long dominated by manufacturing, textiles, coal and timber industries — is making progress.

The council, which was founded last year, is the newest of nine councils around the state, and represents the 13 counties in Southwest Virginia, including the Peaks of Virginia region. It already has an ambitious workload. In May the council sponsored a "Spring 2000 Techno Expo" — a series of workshops on issues such as telework, entrepreneurial development and connectivity. It is also involved in projects to gauge the level of technology skills in the workforce and create a marketing kit geared to technology companies outside the region.

The first step is improving the region’s technology infrastructure and getting adequate data connections that are commonplace elsewhere. There are four local telephone service providers — including GTE and Sprint — but service has been inconsistent and access to fiber-optic lines is limited. "We’ve had people ... that have ordered higher connections and they’ve had excruciatingly long wait times, because the bandwidth isn’t there," she says. Sprint, a major bandwidth provider in the region, has only 20 percent capacity available, Sikora says, though it is planning to expand its infrastructure in the Interstate 81 corridor this year. Another problem is a lack of network redundancy. In several instances last year, she says, damage to part of the Sprint system knocked out service to the whole network.

Sikora hopes that projects such as Virginia Link, an initiative of Virginia’s Center for Information Technology, will improve the supply of affordable Internet access. The program was announced late last year as part of Gov. Jim Gilmore’s efforts to extend technology access throughout the state. The council is also working with the Northeast Tennessee Technology Council and Eastern Tennessee State University on a plan to build a regional "GigaPOP" — a physical location where several Internet backbones meet. The federal government has funded about 30 such facilities around the country and will award $17 million in matching funds for another 43 this year. They attract high-tech companies in the same way that intersecting highways do because they provide inexpensive high-speed Internet access and faster local traffic.

One technology initiative already has money in hand. The Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon recent got a $225,000 state grant to develop an e-commerce assistance project to help local companies.

It’s a challenge to get a diverse set of communities grounded in economies shaped by coal, timber or manufacturing to think about technology, Sikora says. "I almost feel like I’m running three different technology councils in a way," For local governments and chambers of commerce it is "a philosophy change" to begin pursuing technology companies, she says. "They’ve been catching on pretty well."

The region’s strengths and weaknesses were outlined at a May 1999 meeting in Abingdon of the Governor’s Commission on Information Technology, Network Solutions chairman Michael Daniels laid out the region’s strengths: a strong network of two- and four-year colleges, and the availability of telecommunications infrastructure in many areas. Weaknesses included the lack of a major airport, a shortage of workers with skills to maintain telecommunications hardware, and problems attracting mid-level managers and CFOs.