Study: Cities with super-fast Internet speeds are more productive

A new study finds that access to next-generation Internet speeds may be connected to better economic growth.

According to a report by the Analysis Group, cities that offer broadband at 1 gigabit per second -- roughly 100 times the national average of 10 megabits per second -- report higher per-capita GDP compared to cities that lack those Internet speeds. Of course, all the normal caveats apply: It's hard to draw a causal inference from the study, and it's possible there's something else about the 14 gigabit cities that made them better off to begin with. Still, the paper's methodology seems relatively straightforward. Drawing from federal statistics, the Analysis Group identified 14 metropolitan areas where over half of the population had access to gigabit speeds in 2011 and 2012. Then the researchers compared those areas against 41 neighboring cities where gigabit Internet wasn't widely available. Cities with gigabit connections reported 1.1 percent higher per-capita GDP than their slower counterparts, the study found. That might not sound like much, but consider that per-capita GDP in the entire United States has been growing at a pace of one to two percent a year since the recession, according to the World Bank.