Helping Communities

SNG offers solutions to help your community address your broadband needs in the right way, unleashing the power of broadband for community vitality and growth.

Community leaders – Mayors, City Managers, County Administrators, and other officials – are facing pressures to maintain the vitality and relevance of their community in a digital economy while trying to manage with increasingly stretched budgets. In a “globalizing” world where businesses can compete virtually anywhere and citizens increasingly access services from home, the platform needed for everyone in the community to be connected with high-quality broadband becomes infrastructure – as important to community health as road and electrical infrastructure.

While the availability of broadband continues to expand and technologies continue to improve, many communities continue to live with unserved and underserved areas and have to settle for increasingly outdated technologies. This is especially true for smaller communities whose market is not large enough to attract new investments by commercial broadband providers. This status quo is increasingly untenable for communities that risk being left behind or forced to forgo opportunities for economic growth and quality of life for their citizens.

Without the necessary local broadband infrastructure, including last mile to the premise:

• How can smart city / neighborhood services be implemented?
• How can a community or region retain or attract businesses when they cannot get the broadband they want or need?
• How can telecommunications and broadband providers deliver services to areas where there is not enough of a private sector return on investment?

Let’s change that.

The Vision

Community leaders with a vision for their community understand that they need to take control of their own broadband future. They know that continuing with the status quo means eventual erosion of the competitiveness of the business community and quality of life for its citizens. This leads to shrinking tax bases and increasing challenges for attracting businesses and maintaining an active workforce.

For communities, broadband is more than about simply providing high-speed internet connections. As important as that is, broadband is also the core of essential digital infrastructure that enables the transformation into smart communities that provide the quality of life and business environment needed and expected by its citizens.

How to address these challenges is not always clear for communities with limited budgets and resources while needing to balance multiple competing needs.

What can you do about broadband? What should you do?

Community leaders need answers to these questions based on facts and objective analysis to build buy-in and make the right decisions about their broadband future.

At SNG we recognize that addressing broadband is not your only priority and that you may not have all of the right resources or expertise at hand to confidently make the decisions you need to take action. We understand that you need to get to these decisions without making major financial commitments before you have determined the right path forward.

We also deeply understand that assisting communities in finding the right path through their broadband challenges is not only good for your community, but ultimately good for your region. This is what drives our passion to work with communities to find solutions that make sense for your specific circumstances and why we have developed information, resources, and services that are both cost-effective and relevant.

“Michael and Gary were not only great to work with but the data SNG has from their digital economy database provides a stack ranking that cannot be disputed. It’s one thing to understand your constituents but understanding where you fit in the overall industry is a huge game changer.”

Angela Imming
Director of Technology and Innovation
City of Highland, Illinois