The economic history of the South Bend area is a story of location and logistics. Rivers for shipping, then railroads, highways and air transportation enabled for more than a century the movement of materials to create a world center of manufacturing.

As manufacturing declined in the latter half of the 20th Century, ideas and services became the dominant drivers of the area’s economy.

Once again, location provides an advantage. South Bend is, quite literally, sitting on the logistics necessary to support this new economy. As raw materials and the products manufactured from them travel on railroads and highways, information travels on fiber optic cables and networks. Just as I-80/90, the “Main Street of the Midwest,” crosses the northern quadrant of St. Joseph County, one of the largest concentrations of national and regional long-haul fiber runs underground through the center of South Bend.

Like a limited access highway without an onramp, proximity alone does little for a community.

Access to high-speed and high capacity broadband services allowing the region to make full use of these logistics was limited. Even when available, the cost was many times higher in South Bend than for the same level of service in nearby Chicago, putting area businesses and institutions at a disadvantage.

And the limitations of the St. Joseph County’s telecommunications infrastructure were becoming increasingly critical. The University of Notre Dame, for example, had adopted a goal of becoming a major global player in research and commercialization of technology. University officials said that an affordable, geometrically scalable means of communicating voice, video and data, was absolutely vital to support this goal.

Existing providers had little incentive to invest in building the reliability, capacity and level of service needed to support the new economy. Economic development such as that offered by Notre Dame's expanding role could be strangled without a 21st Century telecommunications infrastructure.