Unfortunately, Andrea Schruijer made clear that much of what had just been said at the the Industrial Authority 19 February 2013 hadn’t been heard.

It’s not that we’re saying we don’t have broadband. We have connectivity; that’s not the issue. We have great partners that help us with that.

Well, local “leaders” need to learn to say it: “we don’t have broadband!” Many of the people of Lowndes County and even more in the surrounding counties can’t afford Internet access at all, as Idelle Dear told the Lowndes County Commission. And the “great partners” Ms. Schruijer bragged about will never provide it for us without a lot of prodding, because AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and Comcast and Mediacom don’t think anything outside the Atlanta beltway has enough population density to bother with, and even in Atlanta all people get is U.S.-style low-speed low-reliability Internet connectivity that would never even be on sale in Japan or France or Korea or Finland or even Estonia.

Tom Call illustrated my point when he talked about a residential project where a provider installed cable and claimed they were providing voice, TV, and Internet access, but then didn’t actually have the capacity for Internet when people started using it.