[MUSIC]
[SOUND OF CAR SPEEDING BY]
You know, people think Bend is eastern Oregon.
That's central Oregon
We're two hours and 130 miles from Cascades in Bend.
I still like being five hours and 260 miles
away from Corvallis, for a variety of reasons.
Having the technology to be...
have the same speed as Corvallis is awesome because we need to be able
to do that for our job, for our work, for our faculty to be productive.
The collaboration that happened in the context of
LINK Oregon has allowed us to buy fiber routes
in these very rural parts of the state. From, from Bend to Burns,
if we've ever driven that, there's not a whole lot there.
But we are very lucky that telcos put fiber in there,
and we now have rights to use that fiber.
Very similar from Portland, across the Columbia River and around
Mount Hood and into Pendleton, and then further out east into into Boise.
We have routes now, too along those, areas.
We would never have been able to build our own fiber.
[LUCAS TURPIN] We're Carnegie community engaged institution
that means that we don't do stuff for communities.
We don't do stuff to communities, we do them with communities.
And that means that we have to be there, engaged with them.
Sometimes that means driving down.
Sometimes that means jumping on a Zoom call.
So we need them to have the connectivity as well
so that we can have that reciprocal relationship.
[DAVE] Now we have 8 federal scientists, 5 state scientists,
17 support staff and technicians, 1 Nature Conservancy scientist,
1 Nature Conservancy technician, then in the summer, a lot of times
we’ll bring in 30 to 40 additional...
We used to have what was called a two-bundle T1 lines,
and I don't know what that means, but that’s what they told me it was.
We had ten megabytes a second, was our internet capacity
which when I came in 1998, that was a lot.
I mean, we were able to do a lot. Well, things change.
Now since we have brought in fiber, we’re at one gigabyte a second.
That's 100 times faster than what we were.
What that has allowed us to do....
There are some data sets that when we would try to download,
we would have had to leave a computer on overnight
and hope it would finish in 8 to 10 hours.
A lot of times it took a couple of days, sometimes, for that to happen.
Now it's minutes to an hour or less
[JOHAN] As we improve connectivity to these communities,
the world is becoming digital, the state is becoming more digital.
The information that is available is more readily available online
than anywhere else. And it will help these communities
to become part of Oregon's digital environment...
Oregon's digital citizenry.
[Music ends with a whoosh sound and ding of a bell]
Extension Service