Rural Americans have perhaps the most to gain from VoIP and broadband deployment.

Nowhere is the VoIP opportunity as profound as it is in rural America. VoIP can bring jobs, deliver new economic opportunities and reconnect distant families. This transformation will enable consumers to bridge the distance between urban and rural America, rural telecom companies to extend broadband more affordably, businesses to transform the way they do business, rural communities to connect to a new world of remote job opportunities, and rural economies to become an engine for higher paying information age jobs.

In many rural communities, because jobs have migrated to urban areas, high school graduates often feel they have only two choices — go away, or go nowhere. Broadband and VoIP will radically change these dynamics. VoIP can make it easier for rural Americans to connect to higher paying jobs without moving out of town.

“As voice traffic is increasingly conveyed in packets, it becomes difficult to distinguish a voice call from e-mail, photos, or video clips sailing over the Internet. This is one of the most exciting developments in telephony in decades, and it promises a new era of competition, new efficiencies, lower prices, and innovative services. But we have to make sure that all consumers can benefit from the promises that VoIP may hold.”
— RUS Administrator and former FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein

VoIP: Creating New Rural And Remote Job Opportunities

Companies are finding VoIP is much more cost effective at enabling them to serve remote and rural workers. For example, some companies have found that serving employees in remote locations with traditional telecommunications costs them $150 to $300 per month per employee in the field. But VoIP allows the cost to be dropped to the cost of a broadband connection and enables employees to access previously unavailable job opportunities and save time not commuting to jobs that are far away.

Other ways in which VoIP is helping rural providers become more profitable:

• Rural Texas Co-op Uses VoIP to Drive Profits. Coleman County Telephone Cooperative (CCTC) in rural Texas was able to use VoIP to deliver cutting edge services to its rural subscribers and make the company more profitable. Using VoIP, CCTC was able to deliver a Triple Play of next-generation services -- voice, video and data. Instead of getting only about $20 a month for traditional voice service, CCTC’s average monthly subscriber rate is predicted to reach $57 for digital voice, $92 for voice and data, over $100 for all three.
• Rural Oklahoma Phone Company With Declining Revenues Uses VoIP to Create a More Profitable Triple Play. Cross Telephone in rural Oklahoma faced declining subscriber revenue. But it embraced VoIP and a triple play of voice, video and data over a converged IP network. This end-to-end IP solution enabled Cross Telephone to deliver advanced services, increasing the average subscriber revenue from $45 per month for local telephony to approximately $105 per month to include VoIP, digital TV and high-speed Internet.

The future should not be to deny rural American’s access to these new transformative technologies, but to ensure that rural Americans can take full advantage of their benefits.