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Making Connections: Port, Washougal business focus on bringing faster internet to rural areas

Many rural residents find their internet connections are not able to keep up with increasingly remote world

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A NocTel Fiber truck bears the Washougal-based internet service provider's slogan, "fiber to the forgotten." (Contributed photo courtesy of Cory Schruth)

When Krista Cagle moved to a house north of Washougal almost four years ago, she knew she might be compromising high-speed internet for a chance to own property in a rural area. What Cagle didn’t count on was the COVID-19 pandemic, which emphasized the reality of how much she really needed faster internet service.

“I can’t really do Zoom meetings, especially if I have some sort of presentation to give, because my internet will cut out,” said Cagle, the Port of Camas-Washougal’s director of finance. “All of a sudden, this box pops up that says, ‘Your internet connection is unstable.’ Whenever I see that, I know that if I’m the one talking, nobody will hear anything I say. I have a daughter who goes to Cape Horn-Skye (Elementary School), and she was trying to do school on a tablet and using some of the bandwidth at times, too. It’s not ideal. And we don’t have cable television, so we rely on streaming — Hulu, Netflix, all of that, and sometimes they just flat out don’t work.”

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