“Think about electricity — we just turn it off and on. Broadband should be the same way.”
That’s what Heartland Forward’s Executive Vice President Angie Cooper told Telecompetitor in an interview last week. Heartland Forward describes itself as a “think and do tank” focused on 20 states it defines as the heartland: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. …
According to Heartland Forward and Cooper, as its representative, access to broadband is the single most important economic issue facing the United States heartland today.
They offer as proof…
As proof of the claim that access to broadband is a leading economic issue, Cooper cited a 2021 Deloitte study that found that “a 10-percentage-point increase of broadband penetration in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs in 2019, or an average annual increase of 269,000 jobs.”
While Heartland Forward’s focus was initially on the “three A’s” — availability, affordability, and adoptability — they have, more recently, focused on affordability and adoptability.