When it comes to economic growth in the UK, let’s follow Kansas City’s lead

CityFibre is delighted, but not surprised, to hear that Kansas City is boasting a new and thriving community of business startups. Entrepreneurs are flocking to the area – now known as the “Kansas City Startup Village” - because of the gigabit internet speeds Kansas City enjoys courtesy of Google Fiber.

The lure of bandwidth that can handle as much data traffic as you can throw at it, is undoubtedly an important driver when choosing where to locate your business. What’s also great to see is the huge variety of startup businesses that are benefitting from the Gigabit speeds and are flourishing in Kansas City, for example a biometrics company, an innovation consultancy, and a local event finding app.

Kansas City is an example of a Gigabit City – one where public services, businesses, education and homes and mobile users reap real benefits from connection to super-fast fibre broadband. It was great to hear how the whole community got behind the project, from the grass roots up to the business leaders and elected leaders. Increases of up to 2% in GDP per annum* are possible from the deployment of fibre infrastructure which, as is starting to be seen from the Kansas Village Startup Village, can breathe life into the economy of an area.

Our vision is to see cities and towns in the UK transformed into Gigabit Cities – and York is well on its way thanks to more than 100km of our fibre connecting schools, council sites, police stations, CCTV locations and NHS sites across the city. Watch this space for news about Gigabit Cities coming to a region near you!

*See, for example, Czernich, N., Falck, O., Kretschmer, T. and Woessmann, L. (2009), ‘Broadband Infrastructure and Economic Growth’, CESifo Working paper no. 2861, December; Crandall, R., Lehr, W. and Litan, R. (2009), ‘The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data’, Research paper, The Brookings Institution, February 26th; Qiang, C.Z. Rossotto, C.M. and Kimura, K. (2009), ‘Information and Communications for Development 2009: Extending Reach and Increasing Impact, Economic Impacts of Broadband’, World Bank Publications, pp 35-50.