Broadband expansion: Essential to Montana small biz growth

If I asked you to characterize Montana’s rural economy, the things that probably come to mind are agriculture, mom and pop businesses on Main Street, and enterprises that connect people with the great outdoors. One thing that probably didn’t come to mind is manufacturing.

But hopefully that’s about to change. Manufacturing businesses are springing up in places you wouldn’t expect in Montana, and entrepreneurs are finding that rural areas in our state are ideally situated for manufacturing enterprises. And if our state takes advantage of the technological changes on the horizon, our manufacturing future looks bright.

When we started PFM Manufacturing, Inc. http://www.landtamer.com/ one of the many hurdles we had to overcome as a small business starting up in rural Montana was our remote location — and to make matters worse, our lack of broadband access. When our company started up in 1998 we had access only to dial-up internet. Despite our urging, the provider in our area was not able to supply high-speed broadband access until 2004 — several years after most of the country had broadband access. Even today, after six years with access to broadband we are still light years behind most urban areas in terms of quality of coverage and reliability.

By Patrick Miller

Full Story: http://mtstandard.com/news/opinion/editorial/broadband-expansion-essential-to-small-biz-growth/article_66cde392-208e-11e1-b714-001871e3ce6c.html