I was fortunate enough to have dinner the other night with a very gifted and smart county administrator, who told me this:
"Our job is to attract talent to our region, not businesses. If we have talented people, we can do anything. And to attract talented people, we have to have the amenities that they want and expect, like broadband."
I think he has it exactly right. In the Knowledge Economy, businesses are becoming more and more portable and less and less reliant on traditional infrastructure like water and sewer. It does not mean that infrastructure is now irrelevant or unimportant, but it does mean that we have to think about it in different ways.
I was at a major top tier college recently, and they told me they had a hiring crisis. New faculty were turning down well paying jobs at this prestigious school. Why do you think? It was because broadband was unavailable outside the "downtown" area of this otherwise rural community. Many faculty wanted to live outside town where they could own a few acres of land and really enjoy country living, but broadband was no longer a nice luxury, it was now a life necessity. These prospective faculty were telling the college they simply would not live in a community without broadband.
In other words, these talented people were not attracted to this community because of the lack of broadband in residential areas, not business parks. So you have to have affordable broadband options in your business and industrial parks, but you also have to have it everywhere else if you want to attract talented people to your region.