Broadband access has heterogeneous effects on establishment entry and exit across industries and across urban and rural markets.  Research highlights the following points:

• Broadband increases firm entry and reduces firm exits, raising the net number of establishments in both urban and rural markets;
• Broadband raises net establishment numbers in construction and professional services in both urban and rural markets;
• Net increases in finance and insurance, information, real estate, and arts and entertainment are confined to urban markets;
• Broadband leads to net establishment losses in rural manufacturing and hospitality and in urban retail sectors;
• Broadband causes a net reallocation of educational services establishments from rural to urban markets.

These results suggest that the common argument that the expansion of rural broadband services as an economic development strategy is more complex. For example, the shift from rural to urban educational services implies that rural customers will presumably be accessing more remote providers of training, information technology and business training, and licensing certification over the internet. As a result, this and other examples demonstrate that a seemingly neutral policy of expanding broadband access into a market can have a small overall effect on net firm numbers, but increase net firm numbers in some sectors and markets and reduce them in others.

Pittsylvania County, Virginia, is taking a unique approach to one of the biggest challenges of expanding broadband in rural areas: the upfront cost of the infrastructure. “Who should pay for the infrastructure?” is a common question when it comes to broadband expansion, said Rebecca Watts, regional vice president of Western Governors University, who serves on the Virginia Chamber of Commerce Workforce and Education Executive Committee. This is especially challenging as broadband infrastructure is often more expensive in rural areas than urban areas, because of the greater distance between homes and more cable that needs to be laid, she said. But in Pittsylvania County, where there are at least 12,000 homes with inadequate internet access, a three-way partnership is addressing the upfront cost of broadband infrastructure while waiting for more money from the state government. The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors, the Pittsylvania County School Board, and RiverStreet Networks, a North Carolina-based network provider that has expanded operations to Virginia, are working together to fund broadband infrastructure. The board of supervisors is putting in $11 million, $6.5 million of which came from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, with the remaining $4.5 million coming from revenue-sharing agreements. 

Westminster City (CO) officials have signed a deal with Google Fiber to bring high-speed internet to the city. The deal will make gig-speed fiber internet available to those in the city. Construction of the fiber optic network will start in 2023 in the city's right of way and easements. Service will become available as network segments are completed. Google and the city will team up to create informational materials for people and businesses in the city. Google Fiber participates in the Federal Communication Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which helps keep people connected to the internet. Eligible homes could get a monthly subsidy of up to $30 toward the cost of high-speed internet. Westminster is now the second Colorado city to get fiber internet. Lakewood announced a partnership with Google in late 2022. 

One of the most striking developments of the last decade has been the rapid “digitalization” of work—and with it, an urgent demand for skill-building. Digitalization is the infusion of digital skills (though not necessarily higher-end software coding) into the texture of almost every job in the economy. And it has inordinate power to both empower workers or divide them. That’s because gaps in access to digital skills engender disparate access to the nation’s best-paying, most desirable jobs and industries. Such gaps can spawn troublesome divides among not just people, but also places. However, recent shifts in post-pandemic labor market demands coupled with a surge of new federal and state policy experiments are building the potential for a distinctive new policy paradigm—one that addresses the nation’s digitalization divide and the desperate need for skill-building and digital transformation in communities. Specifically, a new set of sizable “place-based” investment policies—focused on boosting innovation, tech clusters, and workforce training—suggests a potential playbook for responding more effectively to the need for not just digital inclusion, but also improved local opportunity more broadly. Place-based initiatives are, by definition, place-focused—they seek to benefit people and economies by targeting specific geographies of concern. Dynamic place-based business, academic, civic, and neighborhood networks are essential to delivering strong place-based gains.