Cities with Fast Internet Are Officially More Productive
We know now that the more people that have access to Internet the better. But a new study found that while just having access is great, if the Internet is super fast it can change the course of an entire city. The faster the Internet, the better the economy. It's simple, and yet most of the United States has staggeringly slow Internet.
Boston-based Analysis Group conducted the study that found a connection between Internet speeds and economic growth. For their report, they considered cities that had access to the mythical (at least to us) 1 gigabit per second Internet speed. That's roughly 100 times faster than the national average of 10 megabit per second. That, as you might guess, is insanely fast. It's so fast that the cities who had the gigabit speeds were booming, while others were not.
"Drawing from federal statistics, the Analysis Group identified 14 metropolitan areas, such as Chattanooga, Tenn., Sioux Falls, S.D., and Salem, Ore., where over half of the population had access to gigabit speeds in 2011 and 2012," reported The Washington Post. "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."
As the researches noted in their report, this is nothing new. When the Internet providers ditched dial-up connections, the change in economies across the nation was stark.
"Beginning in the late 1990s, Internet connectivity was transformed by disruptive broadband technologies – 'always on' DSL and cable modem services – which dramatically increased throughput speeds relative to dial-up connections," wrote the team. "As consumers and small businesses adopted these first generation broadband services, the improved broadband connectivity to the Internet facilitated the development of new inventions, new and improved goods and services, new processes, new business models, and has increased competitiveness and flexibility in the economy."
This new report simply backs up what earlier studies had shown: The faster, the better. Literally everything in the gigabit cities happened faster. It was like their economies were given steroids. And if you think a one percent increase in GDP isn't a lot, the report notes that it added up to an extra $1.4 billion in revenue for those cities.
"Isolating the potential impact of the Internet on productivity is important, because even a few tenths of a percent impact on the growth rate could represent a significant portion of any permanent surge in productivity that is maintained in the future," explained the team. Now, how can we get our Internet service provider to read this report? We'd email them a link but it might get there quicker with a carrier pigeon.
[Image via Flickr - World Trekker]
