Montana Sky West key player in economic revitalization
Brent Shrum
Recent telecommunications improvements, coupled with the Environmental Protection Agency’s release earlier this month of a long-awaited risk assessment for Libby amphibole asbestos, could play a key role in the revitalization of the area’s economy, according to Lincoln County Port Authority and Kootenai River Development Council director Tina Oliphant.
“As time goes on, people will want to live here,” Oliphant said. “We will get rid of some of these stigmas, and the economy will break loose.”
Oliphant pointed to the completion last spring of a project to link Libby to Kalispell via fiber optic cable as one of the most significant factors influencing economic development opportunities. The resulting increase in available bandwidth and reduction in data transfer costs can make existing businesses more profitable and provide incentives for new businesses thinking of moving into the area, she said.
Availability of low-cost, high-speed data service is an important “quality of life benefit,” Oliphant said.
“If you don’t have fiber and you’re in a rural, isolated place – I mean Highway 2 is not a big highway – how are you connecting to the world?” she said.
Montana Sky West’s fiber optics project followed the formation of the company in late 2011 to purchase Windjammer Communications’ local cable operations. Montana Sky West is a partnership between Kalispell based Internet provider MontanaSky Networks and CommunityTel of Ronan.
Windjammer lost money in Libby because of “excessively high” data transfer costs resulting from a communications bottleneck, said CommunityTel president Jay Preston. In 2011, data transport costs for Libby were the highest Preston was aware of in the region, at $360 per megabit per second.
By comparison, Preston noted, the cost in Browning – the second highest he knew of – was around $250. Costs at the time in Kalispell were $50 to $75, and they were as low as $20 in national hubs like Seattle.
“You can see how much of an economic disadvantage Libby it is for Lincoln County to have this problem,” Preston said.
The completion of the fiber optic line to Libby brought local costs down to $30 to $35 per Mbps, while continued cost decreases around the country have lowered the price to $20 to $25 in Kalispell and $5 to $10 in national hubs.
Much of the local fiber optic line’s potential remains untapped. While actual usage doubled, “the capacity went up by a gargantuan amount,” Preston said.
Some of that untapped potential could be put to use by companies looking to expand into the area, said MontanaSky founder and chairman Fred Weber. Businesses such as call centers seeking access to local labor may now find it economical to open facilities in Lincoln County, he said.
“There’s a hundred people who drive from Libby to Kalispell every day to work at TeleTech, and those people could stay in Libby if TeleTech were to build a satellite office,” Weber said.
Weber said he’s hopeful that the infrastructure improvements will help erase Lincoln County’s reputation as “the Appalachia of Montana” and put the area on a technological “even keel” with the rest of the world.
He recalled the early days of the Internet in Lincoln County, when the now-defunct publicly owned provider Kootenet pledged “to fill the local pothole on the information superhighway.”
“I want to say that that’s gone,” Weber said. “The information superhighway is paved all the way to where it turns off into the Yaak.”