I’m bringing back an old tradition – looking at how much money broadband can save a household right before the holidays set in. I’m bringing back the old tradition with a new spin, I’m using ChatGPT. Something old; something new.

I started with a search on [how much money does a household with broadband save or earn?].

It pulled up some good articles, but they were dated. I will let my age (or Master’s degree in Library and Information Science) show when I admit that I want links to article, not cite-less answers. But I moved forward asking for updated information. Below are the results:

Turns out that much of what I found interesting was from the same research: Economic Benefits of Fiber Deployment, a report prepared for Fiber Broadband Association and Frontier Communications from Nov 2024. The focus is on fiber over all other broadband modes – but was the best I could find in terms of specific saving and earning numbers.

Here’s the quick description of part of the research…

Our study is the first to show that fiber deployment has significant incremental economic benefits even in the presence of other high-speed broadband technologies.

The report looks at broadband savings/earning from the household and national perspective. I thought I’d pull out the details by household.

Related to real estate:

• It could increase average household values between 14% – 17% depending on
  non-urban versus urban areas.
• This translates to an average increase of $27,000 – $41,000 per house per year.
• The effect on housing values in non-urban areas is fives times greater than in
  urban areas and is driven by the greater number of unserved households in non
  urban areas.

Earning:

• The income effect comes from non-urban areas. U.S. households in non-urban
  areas with new access to fiber will likely experience an increase in their average
  income by $1,450 in one year.

Community Employment:

• Access to fiber incrementally increases the employment rate by a small but measurable 0.74%. This is equivalent to a 0.5% increase in employment.
• For a city such as Detroit, with a labor force of approximately 356,408 people,
  deploying fiber to all the unserved households would create 36 new jobs.
• For a small rural town such as Iron Mountain, Michigan, with a labor force of approximately 4,363 people, deploying fiber to all the unserved households would
  create at least 14 new jobs.