Nov 6, 2017 3 min read

Slow and unreliable internet service has long been a nuisance for people living in Greene County, especially in rural areas far away from Waynesburg.

Windstream Communications, which supplies the vast majority of internet and phone services for the county, is typically the butt of jokes from both residents and government officials who are unhappy with its service.

But it was no laughing matter Oct. 31 when Windstream’s selective router malfunctioned at Greene County’s emergency dispatch call center, leaving county residents unable to dial 911 for more than four hours. During that time, no major incidents occurred and residents were still able to dial a nonemergency phone number for help.

It still was an agonizingly long time in which dispatchers and county emergency managers scrambled to work with a Windstream contractor to get the system operational again. While this was not necessarily an internet connectivity issue, it raises an overall concern about the reliability of telecommunications in rural counties.

In response, county emergency officials and state Rep. Pam Snyder, D-Jefferson, met with Windstream to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

In fact, Snyder already had a meeting scheduled with Windstream for the following day. That meeting had been planned to discuss slow internet speeds in rural areas. However, it quickly turned toward overall reliability concerns with the telecommunications company’s service to the 911 center in Waynesburg.

Unfortunately, the problem goes much deeper.

A public meeting in Waynesburg last August between state legislators and various internet providers illustrated how the patience of public officials is wearing thin. During that meeting, both Snyder and fellow Democratic state Rep. Brandon Neuman of North Strabane raised serious concerns about network reliability in rural Pennsylvania and why more isn’t being done to fix the problem.

“We need to identify why we can’t get to where we need to be,” Snyder said. “We can’t fix this overnight.”

In reality, it’s a financial issue. Telecommunications companies don’t want to spend money installing high-speed internet to areas where there are few customers. Their costs would be exorbitant.

But that doesn’t explain why there are still network reliability issues in Waynesburg. The borough is home to the courthouse and county government, and it has the third-largest population of any municipality in Greene County. It’s not exactly off the beaten path, either, being just two miles from Interstate 79.

County Emergency Director Greg Leathers has pledged they are working closely with Windstream “exploring other avenues” to find a more reliable telephone routing. The sooner, the better.

Regardless of the reasons behind the slow internet service – which can and should be solved – what happened with the 911 call center’s phone service can never happen again. The stakes are too high.