Daily Yonder: The broadband speed divide

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 04/20/2011 - 10:31

Here is another excellent piece from The Daily Yonder about the sad state of rural broadband. The article has a short, well illustrated analysis of the gap between rural broadband speeds and the rest of the country, taken from new data released by the federal government. Here is a summary of the very bad news:

• Rural residents are twice as likely to have much slower "little broadband" speeds than the rest of the U.S.
• Rural residents are ten times more likely to have no choice of providers than those in urban areas.

From an economic development perspective, this is a slow motion catastrophe, as young people will leave rural areas without adequate broadband, and entrepreneurs and the self-employed will NOT move to rural areas with inadequate "little broadband."

Meanwhile, legislators in North Carolina are throwing their rural constituents under the bus of broadband crony capitalism, with incumbents determined to protect their monopoly position in the marketplace at all costs.