What The Internet Means to Rural America

What The Internet Means to Rural America

What The Internet Means to Rural America. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I use the internet everyday and I’m connected through a very high speed cable outlet. But then I live in an urban setting. For those people who live even a few miles outside of town and even in smaller rural communities, getting anything more than an very slow dial-up connection is iffy. Harry Thibedeau of Excede Internet Service discusses what bringing broadband internet to rural America can mean.

THIBEDEAU: We know, number one, that economic development in rural America is absolutely tied to internet connectivity. If you don’t have good, high quality internet service it’s literally like when the interstate highway system was built in the movie Cars. We can’t afford to have rural America in that situation today.

Thibideau talks about the educational and economic benefits of broadband for the younger population in rural America.

THIBEDEAU: The last thing we can ever afford as a country is to have that educational divide that exists and so it becomes a huge sucking sound as the youth of America pull away from rural areas because they don’t have - they’re not going to come back from college and live in an area that they can’t access information on their iPads and everything else, they’ve got to have that connectivity.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.  

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