I was in a rural community recently that is already in crisis because of poor broadband service. What they told me is that new hires for businesses in the town simply won't live there. Instead, they are locating their families about an hour and a half away and enduring two to three hours of commuting each day to work.
What are the issues? The kids can't do their schoolwork at home because of poor connectivity. The stay at home spouse can't effectively use online shopping to support living in a rural area with limited bricks and mortar stores. The kids feel cut off because social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and many others run slowly or not at all. Families can't use services like Hulu and Netflix and there are no video stores left. Home-based workers and home-based business development is completely stalled out because the very poor quality DSL and cable modem services in the area simply won't support two way video (e.g. Skype, GoToMeeting, Webex), moving large files back and forth, and efficient access to cloud-based services.
I still have some economic developers who look at the Netflix stats (video on demand services are using over a third of all the bandwidth in the U.S. on nights and weekends) and don't see the connection to economic development. But if you can't attract workers to your community, you also are going to have problems attracting businesses to your community. It's all one problem.
The businesses that were already in the community were screaming for more bandwidth and desperate for both more than one service provider and more than one cable path out of town. Redundancy has become a huge issue even for small and medium sized businesses as more and more business data is moved in real time between the businesses and off-site servers (i.e. the "cloud").