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Report: Broadband Can Transform a Rural Community
One of the biggest rural gaming events in the country, the GigaZone Gaming Championship and TechXpo, is supporting young people to explore technology and all it offers in Bemidji, Minnesota.
“We had started to see nationally some very large events that were selling out quickly, all about eSports,” Gary Johnson, CEO of Paul Bunyan Communications, told the Daily Yonder in a Zoom interview. “And we thought, what a better way to deliver a new, exciting opportunity for our region and leverage the network that we have built and our members have invested in.”
The eSports event was highlighted in a report from the Center on Rural Innovation about the benefits fiber broadband brings to rural communities.
“For those communities that had high broadband utilization, they saw a tremendous difference, specifically with entrepreneurship,” Amanda Weinstein, director of Research at the Center on Rural Innovation, told the Daily Yonder in a Zoom interview. “We saw not just our businesses not closing, but new businesses opening. The difference was so stark that it was a 213% difference in the business growth rate.”
Johnson said the Covid-19 pandemic changed things for many communities.
‘It wasn’t until Covid, I think, that many people realized the difference: You start doing a lot of two-way Zoom calls,” he said. “You have more interactive things. And it really then became clear that what we’ve been investing in was very impactful. And we saw we’re busier than ever trying to keep people and get new people connected to that network.”
There is hope that expanded broadband in Statesboro, Georgia, will help the community break its pattern of persistent poverty, which means it has had poverty rates above 20% for more than 30 years.
Serial entrepreneur Adam Tsang believes reliable, super-fast Internet is paramount for his business in the southeastern part of Georgia, Whiskey Grail.
He said that in today’s world, slow connections, even when temporary, have an outsized impact on businesses such as his: “The moment your internet is slow, it’s almost like it’s the end of the world,” he said in a case study statement.
“This is a place in a county that is facing significant disadvantages across many different levels,” Weinstein said. “Compared to other rural areas, they have a higher percentage, for example, of minority populations on top of those high poverty rates, and despite this, what you see from Bulloch Solutions – they are broadband service provider – is really this commitment that everyone, and they mean everyone across the county, should have access to high speed internet.”
In Bulloch County, 100% of locations are served by high-speed fiber broadband service, far surpassing other persistent poverty counties and the nation, according to the report.
Weinstein said that a lot of people may think of streaming when they think of broadband service, but it can be used for many different applications.
“Broadband is used for so much more, and what we’re seeing is just that exposure in those communities shows people how much more it’s used for,” she added.
For example, eSports.
“What we find is when you expose young kids to broadband, what research has shown is you actually get higher broadband adoption rates,” Weinstein said. “And it’s not the kids who are using their allowance to get broadband subscriptions for the household – it’s the adults. That exposure that kids have in various ways actually gets their parents exposure as well and gets you those higher broadband adoption rates in communities.”
The report also found that in areas with high adoption rates of broadband, self-employment increased by 10% or more.
“Counties that effectively utilize broadband are seeing marked improvements in local economic dynamism, suggesting that broadband can help mitigate the economic disadvantages often faced by rural areas,” the report concluded.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.