Community Growth with Fiber Investment | Community Fiber Broadband Investment Case Study | Corning

Bob Whitman
Published: April 17, 2025

Nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, Charlottesville, Virginia is renowned for its historical charm and academic prowess as the home of the University of Virginia. And now, the city that was once the home of Thomas Jefferson is at the center of a digital revolution highlighted in a recent case study by the Fiber Broadband Association. Businesses and homeowners in Charlottesville are capitalizing on a game-changing investment to deploy high-speed fiber broadband to every home and business, and it’s paying off.

Fiber Broadband Investment

Crews laid the first mile of fiber broadband in Charlottesville more than a decade ago to support businesses around the city. Since then, it has grown into a dense network of more than 230 miles of fiber in the city limits. That’s enough fiber to stretch from Charlottesville to Philadelphia. And laying all that fiber was no easy task. Charlottesville’s difficult terrain and existing infrastructure lead to a mixture of aerial and underground fiber.

The fiber build began with one company but has since expanded to multiple fiber providers. That competition gives customers access to high-speed broadband at affordable rates.

This growing fiber network supports a diverse range of businesses in the defense, health care, and biotechnology industries as well as a flourishing start-up environment through the University of Virginia.

The FBA case study examines what it took to blanket Charlottesville in fiber broadband and reveals the tangible economic benefits fiber brings to communities. The study focuses on three key indicators: private sector job growth, housing value, and digital microbusiness density.

1. Private Sector Job Growth

First, let’s dive deeper into private sector job growth. The private sector is critical to the health of a local economy with small businesses providing goods and services that generate tax revenues for local, state, and federal governments. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nearly half of Americans work for small businesses, and those small businesses account for nearly 44% of the United States’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The Fiber Broadband Association’s case study reveals more than one third of Charlottesville’s private sector job growth between 2015 and 2019 is directly related to the availability of high-speed fiber broadband. The association reviewed publicly available data, comparing Charlottesville to other similarly populated cities in Virginia.

The FBA study noted an impressive 40% growth in employment trends in the professional, scientific, and technical industries since 2014 when the fiber build started. Many of the new jobs are well-paying with salaries close to $100,000. The study found other cities that did not have targeted fiber deployment remained stagnant or even declined over that same period.

2. Housing Value

The value of Charlottesville’s fiber investment ultimately permeates into the lives of people living in the area by fundamentally boosting the housing market. The FBA study found since 2015, the area has seen an average annual increase of $4 million in housing value. Fiber has become an attractive selling point for homeowners, especially in the post-pandemic world of remote and hybrid work.

While the percentage increase in home values may stabilize as universal access to fiber is achieved, the overall economic impact is clear. The rise in home prices and better paying jobs provides a larger tax base which local and state governments can use to invest in community services, infrastructure improvements, and educational programs.

3. Digital Microbusiness Density

Laying the groundwork to connect an entire community to fiber opens possibilities for more small businesses or even so-called “microbusinesses” which have fewer than 10 employees. Microbusinesses rely heavily on websites to do business, and data from domain name provider GoDaddy shows Charlottesville has significantly higher digital microbusiness activity per capita when compared to peer cities in Virginia and even Virginia’s overall average. This density is considered a key indicator of small business health. 

GoDaddy research cited in the study found Charlottesville leads among comparable cities in several key metrics critical for microbusinesses to thrive. Chief among them is the “physical infrastructure necessary to access and use the internet.” The fiber-based infrastructure enables those businesses to access a workforce and resources outside of Charlottesville allowing them to operate more efficiently. Fiber also supports growth by allowing businesses to access cloud services that deliver sales, marketing, and e-commerce tools.

Future-proof Investment

Charlottesville’s overhaul is just one example of how cities large and small are creating a future-proof path for continued economic growth. Other cities have adopted the model of offering fiber broadband as a utility. Fiber networks require virtually no maintenance compared to legacy solutions and can be easily upgraded as technology applications advance. Corning invented the first low-loss optical fiber more than 50 years ago and has championed the benefits of fiber broadband since before the turn of the century.  Since then fiber optics have become vital to accommodate the demands of our rapidly evolving digital era, enabling faster, more reliable connections both now and in the future.