Perryville welcomed as a new ‘gig city’

Perryville is beginning the journey into the age of technology. In its effort to jumpstart its “Live Here, Work There” initiative, the City of Perryville is partnering with Charter Spectrum to launch faster broadband speeds to its residents. The announcement was made during a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Catalyst Center for Business on Friday.
“This is something that we have been working on for a while,” City Administrator Brent Buerck said. “We feel that it is the direction that we needed to go and we are glad that Charter has agreed to help us with that.”
The overall scope of the project is to eventually provide high speed internet to residents of Perryville. The partnership allows Perryville to become a “Gig City,” according to Buerck and allows the city to provide 1 Gigabyte Internet speeds. Those speeds to be comparable to St. Louis and other larger cities. Perryville residents are currently able to have the fastest internet speed available.
Senior Director of Government Affairs for Spectrum, Jarad Falk said they are proud to partner with the city.
“Perryville shares are vision for the future,” Falk said. “We have invested a lot of time and money in our network and that has allowed us to expand our reach in places like Perryville.”
Perryville conducted a survey along with 900 other communities, which consisted of 2.2 million citizens in 49 states and Buerck highlighted a few of those during the ceremony including the residents’ 91 percent satisfaction rating with the city which was is significantly higher than other communities in the region and on a national scale. In 56 of 57 categories on the survey Perryville was rated significantly higher. In another category, Buerck highlighted that 87 percent of the surveys noted that Perryville is a great place to raise children.

“That says a lot about the school systems in Perryville,” Buerck said. “You can’t be great place without great schools.”
The one question that Buerck focused the most on was how important high speed internet was at home.
“We are living in a Zoom world and a COVID world and today that is a big focus,” Buerck said. Hopefully we are on the downswing of that with a little luck and a whole lot of grace,” Buerck said. “A total of 62 percent said that it is very important to have high speed internet.”
That service has already paid dividends for several groups at the catalyst center who work with companies and St. Louis and Boston and do their work in Perryville.
“That just goes to show that you can work anywhere, if you live here and I think this will serve us well with our schools and businesses.”
Director of the Perry County Economic Development Authority Scott Sattler noted that high speed broadband is essential technology in 2021.
“It’s as valuable as electricity was to infrastructure in the 1950’s and I’m proud to be part of Perryville 2.0,” Sattler said.