“Broadband is just as important to this century as rural electric was to the last century,” Kathy Johnson told a crowd of Chilton County residents and business owners yesterday during a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Johnson is the director of Connecting Alabama, a statewide initiative aimed at making high-speed Internet available to people in rural areas.

If you don’t know just how important broadband is to rural areas, consider that farmers use it to market their products on a worldwide basis. Children depend heavily on the Internet for their daily education needs, and having a reliable connection is vital in this case.

The list goes on. Broadband is an essential part of the infrastructure industries look for when looking to locate to an area.

We should be aware of the need for broadband in our area.