If you doubt the value of a local high-speed fiber-optic network, consider what the people of Ten Sleep, Wyoming (population 300) have done with theirs:

New global outsourcing hub — Wyoming?

When it comes to call centers filled with English-speaking employees, India likely comes to mind. Not a tiny town in Wyoming called Ten Sleep, population about 300.

What Ten Sleep has is not, exactly, a call center. Instead, the town is home to a teaching center that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, American teachers provide real-time video English lessons to thousands of students in classrooms across Asia via high-speed fiber optic networks.

Ten Sleep isn’t the only small Wyoming town that has a center: So does Cody, Powell, Lovell and nearly a half dozen other communities across the state. They’re owned by Eleutian Technology, a company that is using the internet to bring jobs once outsourced to cheap labor in the East to back to unemployed Americans in the West.

Read full story here.

When the time is right, maybe we should invite Eleutian Technology to Nevada County.

This is just one example of the countless opportunities afforded by a high-speed fiber-optic regional backbone.