VICE interviewed Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks initiative, to get his perspective on a new study that shows high-quality broadband access lowers unemployment rates in communities. His contributions are below: 

Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Motherboard that EPB not only drove higher employment via its own operations, but also likely contributed to an increase in hiring by regional private ISPs forced to do something arguably alien to them: compete.

“AT&T and Comcast have probably increased their sales staff and local employees to deal with the competition,” Mitchell said. “So that is an impact on unemployment just among the firms offering broadband services.”

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Mitchell conceded that measuring the economic and employment impact of better broadband can be difficult, but said there’s no doubt that the city’s foray into broadband provided profound benefits to the region as a whole.

“I think this field of study is quite complicated but we know that Chattanooga has attracted many new companies to the Gig City precisely because the city has built the infrastructure of the future,” he said. “If it did not increase employment opportunities, that would be shocking.”

Read the full story here. 

The Carolina Public Press interviewed Christopher Mitchell, Director of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks initiative, for a story about two proposed bills in North Carolina that aim to help bridge the digital divide. 

His contributions are below: 

Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said it’s evident by what’s happening on the ground that the major companies like Spectrum, AT&T and Century Link are far more interested in investing to compete in the lucrative, more densely populated markets. At the same time, he said, they’re fighting off changes in order to hold onto their monopolies in the less populated regions.

“It’s a fundamental conflict because North Carolina needs to encourage other kinds of investment,” he said.

“The big companies will not get the job done in the rural areas.”

Mitchell, who took part in a series of broadband discussions in January in several North Carolina communities, said the result has deepened the digital divide here. Among the states, he said, North Carolina has one of the greatest discrepancies between the digital haves and have-nots.

“There is more investment in high-quality networks in North Carolina cities than the average cities in the United States, and there is less investment in the rural areas than the average for rural America,” he said.

“I would expect to see a second or third fiber option in Chapel Hill or Raleigh before I’d see the first one in a town 75 miles east of there,” Mitchell said.

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Christopher Mitchell, director of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks initiative, was quoted in the Stanly News & Press's coverage of Let's Connect, a series of community meetings organized by ILSR, the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and NC Hearts Gigabit. The meetings brought together community leaders, local ISPs, policy experts, and residents to talk about the need for better broadband and potential solutions for the region. His contributions are below: 

“In general, most of rural N.C. has pretty poor access,” said Mitchell, “and I would say not an obvious solution for where better access is going to come from because providers like CenturyLink and AT&T that serve telephone to a lot of rural North Carolina do not have the capacity or the interest in upgrading those services, so there needs to be some other actor that comes in to provide that investment.”

The ultimate goal behind the event is to eventually “have high quality internet access to everyone,” Mitchell said.

“Everyone in the nation is going to have it,” Mitchell said. “The question is, is it going to take 20 years or seven years?”

Mitchell said Stanly is a classic rural county with the major population center of Albemarle having “pretty adequate” internet access compared to the other cities around it. But he said even Albemarle does not have the access people in Charlotte or Raleigh possess.

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“Over the next 50 years, we will see the internet change society more than what electricity has done,” Mitchell said.

The full story can be found here.

A recent piece from The Morning Call examined Internet access rates in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley using recently released American Community Survey (ACS) data. Christopher Mitchell, director of ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative, provided some context for the importance of closing the digital divide. His contributions are below: 

The cellphone, however, isn’t a good option for schoolchildren who need the internet to complete assignments, said Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit that helps communities use the internet to improve the economy and quality of life.

“If you are a 10th-grader trying to do a term paper using a cellphone, that’s very difficult. It results in you having to work so much harder for much less gain than a well-off person,” Mitchell said.

“It affects society as a whole and impacts the achievement gap and the opportunity for young people to do better than their parents,” he said.

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The internet also has become an essential tool for adults. Without it, people may pay more, as their shopping choices are limited to brick-and-mortar stores, Mitchell noted. And they certainly will spend more time filling out paper applications for jobs and government services.

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When communities hover around 30 percent in lack of internet subscriptions — as Portland, Bangor, Easton, Nazareth and Wind Gap do — that’s “worrisome,” Mitchell said. It works against any effort to grow.

“If you are in that situation, one of the concerns is you are going to have much less investment, and so your community is going to struggle in the future. As a local leader, you need to figure out how to fix that. Whether it’s housing value or economic development, better internet access makes all those things better to solve,” Mitchell said.

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According to Mitchell’s Institute for Local Self-Reliance, more than 750 communities across the country have built their own broadband networks to compete with large, established internet providers.

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The only municipality in Pennsylvania to build its own internet network is Kutztown, which started a $4 million network in 2002 and paid for it with taxable bonds, according to the Institute for Local Self-...