Welcome to Rural High Tech!
Thinking back, I've had four "setting the stage" inspirations for creating Rural High Tech.
1. I grew with an intense interest in technology, but in a small town (Port Clinton, Ohio) that didn't have much high tech in it when I was growing up (in those dark days before public Internet access... even pre-personal computer). Not even a Radio Shack store. Now the average Wal-Mart (of which Port Clinton does have one) has more high-tech than I would have dreamed of back in the day.
2. In 1996, I discovered that Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) were providing Broadband Internet Access via Wireless technology in rural areas that weren't likely to get wireline-based Broadband Internet Access for a long time... if ever. I was so fascinated by this development that it triggered a career change and I began writing professionally about Broadband Wireless Internet Access professionally in 1997 and devoted myself to writing about it full-time starting in 2000. (I also have a blog specifically covering the WISP industry.)
3. In Summer 2004 a pair of excellent books came out - Boomtown USA: The 7-1/2 Keys to Big Success in Small Towns, and Life 2.0.
Both talked about a slow-to-recognize resurgence in small towns, and
both made the observation in passing that a primary driver in the
resurgence that they were observing was that talented people could move
away from big cities into more rural areas and still take their jobs,
skills, and careers with them mostly because of existence of Broadband
Internet Access in those rural areas.
4. In 2006 I worked with a company, CONXX, Inc. that builds an incredible wireless-based telecommunications infrastructure system that's ideal (as in designed in the crucible of...) rural areas. It's affordable, flexible, scalable... all the things a telecommunications system for the 21st century should be.
But the catalyst / goad for me to finally create this site / blog - Rural High Tech, was more than a year of reading Jack Schultz's excellent BoomtownUSA blog. Schultz just gets it about rural areas and small towns, and you can't help but be inspired by his stories! (I'm so impressed with the Boomtown USA blog that a feed link is on the right sidebar, which is something I rarely do on my blogs.)
But Schultz doesn't talk much about high tech (well, he talks about high-tech industries that have located to rural areas and small towns that provide jobs and tax revenue), but he doesn't talk much about things like the kind of telecommunications infrastructure that CONXX, Inc. and WISPs provide, and I decided there was a bit of room in the blogosphere for a such a site / blog.
Not to mention I hope to move to one of those wonderful small towns in a few years when we get our daughter graduated from High School. We've loved living in the Seattle area (actually the suburbs out near Redmond...) but the greater Seattle has gotten very urban, very crowded, very traffic-choked, and very expensive in the last two decades that we've been here, and my wife and I are just about ready for a slower, saner, less crowded, lower-cost lifestyle that the two books, and the BoomtownUSA blog describes so enticingly.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
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