Residents to pressure Verizon for DSL access

A drive through the Susquehanna Twp. neighborhoods just north of Harrisburg offers a mix of large stately homes, small ranchers and well-kept townhouses tucked along tree-shaded streets.

With good roads, public water and sewer, a convenient commute to the downtown of the state capital, the neighborhood lacks little.

But for some who live there, Susquehanna's 1st Ward is lacking the utility of the 21st century -- high-speed broadband Internet access through the phone line.

While Pennsylvania regulations call for the telephone companies to offer broadband everywhere in the state by 2015, residents led by the ward's elected commissioner are banding together to try to fast-track the process.

Under what's known as Act 183, if either 50 customers in a "service area" or 25 percent of the customers -- whichever is less -- sign a petition committing to be telephone broadband, or DSL, customers for a year, the company must make the service available within 12 months.

It's called the Bona Fide Retail Request Program, and Ira Shapiro, the 1st Ward's commissioner, is hoping to use it to get Verizon to install the equipment needed to deliver the service to his residents.

"We are in an era where the Internet has become an essential tool for children and their homework and it's important for people to just make contact," Shapiro said. "There is just no end to the uses that people can make of being able to have access to reasonably priced, at a reasonable speed, Internet."

Without DSL service, the only option other than


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