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COLUMBIA — When Mathew Nelson opened Chattooga River Lodge and Campground in the Appalachian foothills in 2020, visitors asked him if they could log onto the TV to play Netflix shows or hop on a virtual meeting using the Wi-Fi.
Nelson had to tell them “no.” The lodge, along with the rest of rural Oconee County in South Carolina’s northwestern corner, didn’t have internet with high enough speeds to support streaming or video calls.
“Just from the customer experience, that was pretty brutal to have to tell people, ‘Maybe you can check your email, but even that’s going to be slow,’” Nelson told the SC Daily Gazette on Tuesday.
In July 2023, three years after the lodge opened, an internet provider awarded a grant from the S.C. Broadband Office installed a fiber-optic cable through Long Creek — population 100 — and Nelson’s lodge got access to high-speed internet for the first time.
The lodge, as well as Nelson’s home down the street, was among more than 100,000 houses, apartment buildings and businesses to get access to high-speed internet as part of a $663 million expansion in broadband across the state. (The total combines federal aid with a partial spending match from internet providers.)
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of broadband and the state’s digital divide. Without high-speed internet, people were unable to keep working, continue their schoolwork remotely or see their doctors.
Recognizing broadband as a critical need, rather than a luxury, legislators designated $400 million in May 2022 from the state’s share of pandemic aid through the American Rescue Plan Act to expand access.
Last month, the state Broadband Office awarded the final $43.3 million of that funding. The last projects are slated to be complete by June 2026, according to the division of the Office of Regulatory Staff.
“It is an incredible feeling to reach this historic milestone for broadband in South Carolina,” Jim Stritzinger, director of the South Carolina Broadband Office, said in a statement.
After all the awarded projects in the state are finished, including those overseen by federal agencies , the state Broadband Office estimates 32,000 homes and businesses will still lack access to high-speed internet, agency spokesman Hank Page said in an email.
‘Very frustrating’
When the Chattooga River Lodge first opened, it had satellite internet. But the connection was slow and only got slower once customers passed the lodge’s cap for high-speed internet that month. In a nine-room lodge and a nearby campground, they would typically hit that cap within the first week of the month, Nelson said.
“So, I’d have one week of lousy internet and then three weeks of god awful internet before it reset,” he said.
Nelson was working another job remotely while running the lodge. To join virtual meetings, he would connect to the video on his computer and call in from his phone because the internet couldn’t support both. Even then, the choppy connection made it difficult to have a conversation, he said.
As the COVID-19 pandemic turned more people into remote workers, unreliable internet became a bigger problem for visitors. Outdoor activities surged in popularity, but remote workers couldn’t easily get to a meeting or answer an email from the lodge or campground, he said.
Just getting paid was an issue, since taking payments from credit and debit cards requires internet access as well. People eating in the lodge’s restaurant often had to wait as the cash registers processed payments using the slow connection.
“The guest is staring at you, and you’re staring at the screen, and you’re just waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and hoping it goes through,” Nelson said. “It was very frustrating.”
Once the lodge got access to high-speed internet, all of that changed. Guests could hop on a work call, answer emails or turn on Netflix for their family at the end of the day.
Plus, fiber is cheaper. For his slow satellite connection, Nelson was paying $175 each month. For fiber, he pays $131 per month for his business plan and $50 per month for his own plan at home.
“It completely transformed us from a trying-to-survive-on-terrible-internet place to a modern-day facility with good internet,” Nelson said.
Nelson installed security cameras at the lodge that he could check remotely and moved out of the apartment in the lodge where he was living and into a nearby house, no longer worried about leaving the lodge alone overnight, he said.
“If I couldn’t see what was going on, I wasn’t comfortable not being there,” Nelson said. “So, it enabled me, actually, to move out of the lodge and have a normal home like a regular person.”
What it means for students
Jeffery Tadlock, a financial literacy teacher at a high school in Darlington County, said the lack of internet access put many of his students at a disadvantage. Even after the school doors reopened and in-class learning resumed, students needed online access to do their homework. But some students couldn’t access their assignments or the resources he posted for them to use, he said.
Tadlock printed out paper copies for students who couldn’t access the website, but if the homework involved something like researching a subject online, students might have a different assignment in their paper packet, he said.
“They would much rather do the original assignment than the one you printed off for them,” Tadlock said.
During the pandemic, some students parked in front of the school with a laptop to do classwork on the school’s Wi-Fi. But that wasn’t an option for students without transportation, who worried how they would get it done, he said.
Now that much of Darlington County has broadband access, nearly all his students have internet at home. The few who still live in pockets without it typically have relatives nearby whose houses they can visit long enough to finish their homework, he said.
“It definitely takes some stress off the students,” Tadlock said.
More work to be done
Greg Covington’s farmhouse just off Highway 332 in Orangeburg County still doesn’t have internet. None of his neighbors have it either, even though many people want it, said Covington, a Norway Town Council member.
“There are a lot of people that could get hooked up to it,” Covington said.
Norway, with its population of roughly 300, is one of two remaining towns in Orangeburg County that still lacks high-speed internet access. By the end of 2024, Norway and Ridge Spring, the other town, will both have fiber-optic cables and free public Wi-Fi in the town center, according to the state broadband office.
That project is one of around 100 still in the works.
Connecting people to broadband is not an easy task, said Sarah Bonnoitt, spokesperson for Horry Telephone Cooperative. Laying the cables is expensive and labor-intensive, and the grants that fund the projects have stipulations about where they must start and end, she said.
The cooperative has connected 5,000 homes and businesses to high-speed internet in Georgetown and Marion counties, Bonnoitt said.
Another 1,100 or so are in the works. During the process, though, the cooperative sometimes had to run a cable through a community without hooking people up or stop just shy of some people’s houses, she said.
“I was in the community a lot talking to residents, saying, ‘This is a phased approach. I promise you, we are committed to continuing this and reaching you,’” Bonnoitt said.
The reasons vary as to why 32,000 locations across the state will still not have internet after all the state’s current grant programs run out. In some instances, it is because no company requested a grant to cover that location or because the state ran out of money before getting there, Page said.
Once people have access to high-speed internet, the next step is making sure they actually use it, said Tri-County Electric Cooperative CEO Chad Lowder.
The cooperative, which has 18,000 members, has expanded broadband to 7,600 homes and businesses across the six counties in the Midlands it covers with the help of federal aid, according to the state Broadband Office.
Lowder estimates at least another 6,000 people in the cooperative’s areas now have access to broadband but haven’t actually hooked up to it, either because they don’t know it’s an option or because they don’t understand how it would benefit them.
“The infrastructure is built. It’s there,” Lowder said. “It’s just the education piece that’s lacking now.”
For Horry Telephone Cooperative, getting people to sign up hasn’t been a problem. But the cooperative is looking for ways to teach people how to use the internet once they have it, Bonnoitt said.
People who have gone their whole lives, in some cases, without high-speed internet access may not realize they can go to their doctors’ appointments or attend classes virtually, she said.
“Let’s make sure that these households understand or have the tools to really utilize this technology to its full potential,” Bonnoitt said.
More funding
With the $400 million in pandemic aid depleted, the state plans to shift gears to a federal grant program called Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment, or BEAD, funded through the federal Infrastructure Investment spending package passed by Congress in November 2021.
That could bring in another $546 million over five years, on top of the $5 million the broadband office has already received through that program for planning.
That should more than cover the remainder of the state, Page said.
If the state gets the approvals it needs to move forward, the office should be able to start allocating that money at the beginning of 2025, according to a timeline Stritzinger presented to the Broadband Advisory Council in April.
“This is a once-in-our-lifetimes opportunity to get this right,” Stritzinger told the council. “I can’t understate that enough. We will never have this amount of money for broadband investment ever again.”
Officials are also searching for alternative ways to bring people internet access. One method could be a contract with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which offers internet through its Starlink division.
In December, the broadband office put out notice that it was pursuing a $3 million contract to reserve up to 1,000 satellite dishes for South Carolina. While not as fast as fiber-optic cables, the satellites could reach parts of the state where installing cables is difficult, Stritzinger told the council.
Talks about that possibility are ongoing, and officials “hope to wrap up a contract with them shortly,” Page said in an email.
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