New York Wants Broadband For All By End of 2018
A modern and accessible online presence is no longer optional for businesses that want to grow and succeed. Access to high speed internet is important because businesses need to be able to reach potential customers, and vice versa. Unfortunately, this facet of everyday life that has become so universal is still a sought after luxury for huge swaths of the population. Particularly in rural communities, slow internet connections dull economic growth, and hurt small businesses and American families. Thankfully, there are tremendous efforts being made to fix this.
We’ve written in the past about Microsoft’s efforts to bring broadband to rural communities, and they continue to expand these efforts. But New York State is hoping to bring high speed broadband internet to their entire state by the end of 2018. New York’s Broadband for All Program is granting $9 billion in grants to bring broadband to communities in New York, like rural Delaware County, that don’t have access to high speed internet. Grants like these are so important because it’s often very expensive to bring the infrastructure necessary for broadband internet to rural communities. By easing some of the financial burden, New York is helping to give all of their citizens access to a resource that has become ubiquitous with modern day America.
Expanding broadband infrastructure so that everyone has access to high speed internet is an important step for our communities, and our economy. The GAIN coalition is thrilled that this issue is gaining the attention it so rightly deserves, and the progress being made both by private institutions and public communities is encouraging. We hope to see everyone gain access to broadband internet, and that this will soon be an issue of the past.