2017 Azbee Awards of Excellence
Category
Print > Regular Column, Staff Written > Pacific
Awarded to
Steven S. Ross, Editor-at-Large
Entry details
Bandwidth Hawk
Issue date (if applicable):
Publication name: Broadband Communities
Publishing company: Broadband Properties LLC
Website home page: www.bbcmag.com
Please describe the publication's mission and readership:
Broadband Communities readers build the networks that make the digital age possible. The magazine supports them with original reporting, well-attended conferences, sophisticated financial models that have been adapted by hundreds of network deployers worldwide, and massive amounts of original research, including the database of fiber optic networks used by the FCC.
A third of the readers are owners and managers of large real estate developments, including multiple-dwelling-unit buildings. Another third run ultra-broadband (usually fiber-optic) networks or work for large national broadband providers. The remainder is split among equipment vendors, financiers, public officials and community activists.
Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:
This past year saw much of our original research on rural development -- a three-year effort that has already won several regional AZBEEs -- become even more startlingly relevant as the presidential campaigns focused on what we already knew. The year's final column calls President Trump's bluff. If he really cares about rural jobs, he should attempt to overturn Republican hostility to rural broadband!
Since 2010 rural counties, for the first time in American history, have been losing population. We believe the single biggest reason for this is not free trade. It is not globalization. It is the lack of broadband access. We published these columns (a regular monthly feature) along with our detailed legislative reporting and original research (the research has been submitted separately) to give readers the details they could obtain no place else.
Our research shows that lack of broadband access can explain as much as half the economic distress in rural counties – even more in counties dependent on farming and manufacturing. Broadband access is poor in the vast majority of rural counties, whether in blue or red states, but tends to be far worse in red states because they are far more likely to restrict municipalities from even threatening to build their own broadband networks, and the restrictions tend to be stronger in those states. (BTW: restriction states are Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
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Bandwidth Hawk
Category
Print > Regular Column, Staff Written > Pacific
Description
Publication name:
Broadband Communities
Company:
Broadband Properties LLC
Winner Status
- National Silver Award
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