One of the biggest rural gaming events in the country, the GigaZone Gaming Championship and TechXpo, is supporting young people to explore technology and all it offers in Bemidji, Minnesota.
“We had started to see nationally some very large events that were selling out quickly, all about eSports,” Gary Johnson, CEO of Paul Bunyan Communications, told the Daily Yonder in a Zoom interview. “And we thought, what a better way to deliver a new, exciting opportunity for our region and leverage the network that we have built and our members have invested in.” The eSports event was highlighted in a report from the Center on Rural Innovation about the benefits fiber broadband brings to rural communities. “For those communities that had high broadband utilization, they saw a tremendous difference, specifically with entrepreneurship,” Amanda Weinstein, director of Research at the Center on Rural Innovation, told the Daily Yonder in a Zoom interview. “We saw not just our businesses not closing, but new businesses opening. The difference was so stark that it was a 213% difference in the business growth rate.” Johnson said the Covid-19 pandemic changed things for many communities.
Source: Route Fifty – All Content
