How Richmond Benefits From Broadband

Richmond Benefits as a Community

  • Aides in attracting and retaining businesses
  • Broadband is an accelerator of economic and social development.
  • Increase opportunities to learn outside of the classroom
  • Ability to provide additional access to government services
  • Broadband enables government to provide more services to citizens, such as business registration, filing taxes and getting information on local laws.
  • Increases both access to, and quality of, health care
  • Equip First Responders with necessary information

Residents Benefit from Fast Home Connections

  • More convenience to accomplish everyday tasks
  • Offers a wealth of entertainment for most ages
  • Allows for additional opportunities to search for employment
  • Provides additional means to communicate with friends and family
  • Learning from home at all levels is possible

Business Benefits

  • Allows business to reach a Global Market Place
  • Offers more options to compare prices and shop for supplies and purchasing on-line
  • Save time by purchasing supplies on-line
  • Ability to push out advertisements, news, sales to a wide audience
  • Helps to recruit job seekers to Richmond
  • Increased productivity and efficiency allows gains to be passed along to consumers

Potential Impact on the Following Industries Important in Richmond

  • Smart Power Grids – installing two-way “smart meters” with wireless Internet will allow households to get detailed home energy usage from the web, with expected energy consumption savings, adjustment of appliances to reduce electricity consumption during peak times, and prevention or rapid repair of outages along the distribution grid.
  • Workplace Flexibility – easy access to employer and public information should enable more work to be done at home, potentially benefitting both workers at established employers and at-home entrepreneurs.
  • Health Care Information – moving from paper files to electronic records should make it easier to communicate about health status and both past and potential future treatments, and to hold down treatment and administrative costs, which in turn should offer gains for patients and for health-care providers
  • Web 2.0 Tools For Civic Engagement – broadband will facilitate even better information dissemination to citizens and enhance connections to both on-line and off-line governmental action and activity.