Category: Reports & Articles

The Importance of Broadband To Economic Development

By Matt McQuade, director of business development, Columbus 2020

Utility service has always been among the most heavily scrutinized factors in the site selection process.Locations are routinely eliminated due to issues pertaining to inadequate — or lack of — electric, gas, water, wastewater, or telecommunications infrastructure. Advances in technology have elevated the importance of the Internet in economic development and site selection. The availability, quality, and competitiveness of broadband service have become and will continue to be a key issue for many locations. Moreover, the United States has a “broadband problem” that is impacting the country’s competitiveness for new investment.

Stimulating Economic Growth with Broadband

By Howard Baldwin

One of the toughest aspects of promoting new technology deployment and usage is finding meaningful facts to support its potential value to local business community stakeholders. While there are readily available estimates and forecasts, detailed analysis and actual payback examples are somewhat rare. That’s especially true with new technologies such as broadband that require the concerted efforts of multiple parties — which can include government agencies, service providers, equipment manufacturers, and end-users — in order to deliver quantifiable results.

Wave of the future?

By James Lardner, Remapping Debate

It’s the economic-policy equivalent of the tree falling in the forest: Around the country, dozens of small and medium-sized communities have begun to build high-speed Internet systems, with some remarkable early results. Outside the affected communities themselves, however, hardly any national leaders are looking at these experiments, or at the idea that broadband, like highways and electricity, might be one of those forms of crucial economic infrastructure where public investment has the potential to spark a surge of private investment, creating jobs and boosting wages and opportunity.

Impact of Broadband Speed and Price on Small Business

by Columbia Telecommunications Corporation

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which small businesses access and use high-speed Internet services, and to evaluate the importance of broadband speed and price for small businesses. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy is required to conduct this study under Public Law 110-385,Sec.105. Advocacy selected a small businesses that specializes in this field — Columbia Telecommunications Corporation — to conduct this research.

Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?

By Robert Kenny and Charles Kenny

Governments around the world are investing multiple billions to support the roll-out of fiber to enable high speed broadband. These subsidies are based on the premise that fiber to the home (FTTH) brings substantial externalities. It is argued that FTTH will support economic growth and is key to national competitiveness; that it will benefit education, healthcare, transportation and the electricity industry; and that it will be the TV platform of the future.

Broadband Among Keys For Economic Expansion

by CHRISTOPHER J. McGOWAN, Executive Vice President, The Siouxland Initiative

In this November’s mid-term elections, the single most important issue, by leaps and bounds, will be the economy, and more specifically job creation. National polls consistently reveal that no other issue is even close. One tool that has proved critical to job creation initiatives in all parts of this country is access to broadband.

European Commission: A Digital Agenda For Europe

The Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) aims to reboot Europe’s economy and help Europe’s citizens and businesses to get the most out of digital technologies. It is the first of seven flagships initiatives under Europe 2020, the EU’s strategy to deliver smart sustainable and inclusive growth.

Connecting America: Broadband & Economic Opportunity

By the FCC

While broadband enabled technologies have clearly brought tremendous economic benefits, the benefits have not reached enough businesses, communities and American workers. Ensuring innovation flourishes across all aspects of the broadband system—broadband networks, devices, and applications—is crucial to the future of the country. The FCC will partner with businesses, including women-owned and minority-owned enterprises, as well as investors and entrepreneurs from all backgrounds to support a flourishing digital economy, and ensure that all Americans can enjoy the benefits of broadband opportunity.

Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth

By Nina Czernich, Oliver Falck, Tobias Kretschmer, Ludger Woessmann

We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental-variable model derives its non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice-telephony and cable-TV networks predict maximum broadband penetration. We find that a 10 percentage-point increase in broadband penetration raises annual per-capita growth by 0.9-1.5 percentage points. Results are robust to country and year fixed effects and controlling for linear second-stage effects of our instruments. We verify that our instruments predict broadband penetration but not diffusion of contemporaneous technologies like mobile telephony and computers.

Next Generation Broadband as a Municipal Utility

It is in the national interest that higher-speed networks proliferate quickly and to the greatest extent possible – and that special measures be taken to ensure that these networks can be accessed by people who live beyond the major metropolitan areas. Accordingly, it is the position of the FTTH Council that anyone who has the means and the desire to build an FTTH network should be allowed and encouraged to do so.