435 Person Town Gets Fiber > Techs?

reply to Karl Bode

Re: Techs?

This country, particularly its urban and super suburban residents, have a fear of rural America. Note the endless slasher flick where some urbanite winds up in a place with a lot of trees and gets hacked apart.

But bringing fiber to these towns, blended with telecommuting, will hopefully disperse some of the population and industry in the country. I believe rural America will be the place to be over the next 20 years.

You may well be right Karl.
I moved closer to the city because it was the only place I could both afford and find a job in. I seriously considered a move to far western Maryland (Allegany county) or West Virginia (Mineral county) when I had a couple potential job offers out there. They didn't quite pan out, but I for one would be intrigued by moving to a very rural area if I could still have a solid, well-paying, reliable tech job.

Let's see what happens.
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With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

reply to shoan
Cost of living (as you mentioned) is another thing a lot of people overlook when taking rural living into consideration. Just about (not everything) is cheaper. Houses, car insurance, shorter commute if you work local. Often, taxes are lower.

And given the mail order-ability of everything, living out of the way is a lot easier than it used to be.

I think I'm one step closer to selling my "suburban" house and moving outward.

It was what my parents did when they were my age....
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Never ask what sort of a computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him? -Tom Clancy

well in our area the property taxes are about half what they are in the neighboring county from the areas that I was looking at. I remember seeing something on one of those primetime type news shows of it was either kansas or nebraska that some company pulled their outsourcing from overseas and "out sourced" it to rural america corn field land. They wired their company up and got off cheaper by keeping it in the country and offering the jobs to lower cost of living areas. I also see rural america becoming a potential boom. A lot of small towns are expanding county airports and becoming shipping hubs which pulls the flight traffic out of urban areas and makes it quicker to get the trucks rolling out to ship things. A lot of people discount what broadband can do for businesses. If you take the direction that the gaming industry is going with digital downloads and online content driving their next generation of gaming consoles. They are going to miss out on a HUGE chunk of money due to people not being HSI served. I know for a fact Sony online entertainment (SOE) has lost about $250 dollars a year from me alone since I have such a hard time playing online with dial up. The numbers were from the yearly subscription fees and the adventure packs i was buying before I moved. not counting the expansions that are 30-40 dollars each. Then there is Blizzard that has lost about $180 dollars a year also due to lack of HSI. Then there is tons of advertising that is not funneled to me since I can not visit many of the increasing HSI friendly websites. Take for instance a lot of people will not see the webisode bridge for battlestar galatica between season 2 and 3 due to dial up. I sometimes wonder why companies don't put more of a heavy lean on the telco's and cable companies to deploy to un served areas which is causing them to lose out on potential revenue. I can guarantee that I would be putting at least $1000 of my disposable money out there to companies a year if I was served by anything other than 24.4 k dial up don't say satellite my area is not accepting anymore subscribers at this time. I know I don't use iTunes due to the dial up. Sorry for long post