Written by Roberto Gallardo and Richard Florida Roberto Gallardo is assistant director of the Purdue University Center for Regional Development and a Purdue Extension specialist. He is the author of Responsive Countryside: The Digital Age and Rural Communities. Richard Florida…

Remote work or telework or telecommute was first coined in the 1970s and has ebbed and flowed since then in economic development conversations. Today, due to a higher broadband penetration, ongoing sophistication of digital applications, and the digitalization of the…

The DDI is a score that ranges from zero to 100, where a higher score indicates a higher divide. The DDI is calculated considering two main factors: the infrastructure/adoption score (INFA) and the socioeconomic score (SE). INFA looks at access…

(This article was adapted from the author’s Medium post) The recent announcement of funding for the Next Level rural broadband investments in Indiana is a step in the right direction to ensure all Indiana communities participate fully in the digital…

fThe Census Bureau released last week 2013-2017 five-year estimates of multiple socioeconomic characteristics, including household with internet subscriptions and computing devices. To further understand an Indiana urban-rural digital divide, census tract or neighborhood level data was analyzed. This analysis utilized…

The latest Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Form 477 dataset was released last month. This June 2017 dataset (includes revisions through August 2018) contains information submitted by internet providers—twice per year—on broadband technologies and maximum advertised speeds at the census block…

Rural broadband is a trendy topic today. One of the reasons for this is broadband is to the 21st century what rail and highways were to last century. Any community, home or individual without access to adequate broadband connectivity is…

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes, even in areas where they have no physical presence. This ruling overturns a 1992 ruling that helped the then nascent internet commerce take off and…