Technology Is Outdated In The Early 2000

With the ever expansive growth of technology many areas nationally are finding themselves increasingly unable to keep up with the ever changing minimum standards of technology. And while this may not seem like an alarming issue at first glance, the reality of the situation is that many areas are being increasingly set up for failure due to outdated technology – and it is only getting worse. Many areas within the country have limited or no access to high speed internet or broadband, and some places are still stuck on a dialup connection which became outdated in the early 2000’s. And the consequences of this reality can be extremely damaging, due to an inability to cash in on the thriving global market that e-commerce has created. One State which

W.V. House Bill 3093 is a bill introduced by the state legislature which, allegedly, will help aid underserved, or in Pocahontas Counties case, unserved areas within West Virginia. It aims at creating both the infrastructure required to get broadband to rural areas, as well as a “broadband enhancement council” which will help oversee that everything is done effectively (“broadband bill”, 2017). However there are also doubts about the bills effectiveness. For example Senator Mike Wolfe expressed concerns because parts of the bill could be unconstitutional (“broadband bill”, 2017). Additionally, as Pocahontas

County has found out already, if the ISP’s are not heavily supervised via either tight legislation or an oversight committee the ISP’s can install infrastructure which aids themselves more than the region they are being funded to help. Ultimately, the bill has potential to help alleviate these regions, but it needs to be executed well and have an effective council in order to achieve its goals. However there is also a question of if it would be economically worthwhile to put this much state funding towards helping

To answer this question we first need to address what kind of growth in industry we can expect to see. According to a study done by the PPIC (public policy institute of California), we can expect to see about a 6.4% growth in employment after broadband is brought to an area. However an important aspect to note is that almost the entirety of the growth we see is information technology related (Kolko, 2010). This is a massively important factor for an area such as Pocahontas County which has a meager college graduation rate of 16.7%, meaning that the region might not have the education level required to see the kind of economic growth desired (U.S. Census, 2016). The second question is how long we can expect broadband levels of around 25 Mbps to be an acceptable download rate in order to achieve economic growth. Many areas currently deemed unacceptable are running off of dial-up connections, which were phased out approximately 15-20 years after installation. This means that the funding, which will be a minimum of eight figures, can be expected to be obsolete within 15-20 years. With these two questions