Southwest Virginia slow to get fast Internet

Watching YouTube videos, downloading large pictures or communicating over webcams likely are not part of your daily home life if you live in Southwest Virginia -- so says new research. The households in 25 Virginia counties that make up the Roanoke/Lynchburg designated market area ended last in a ranking of 79 U.S. markets for broadband use, according to New York-based Scarborough Research. Only 29 percent of the adults in the market have high-speed Internet connections in their homes, according to the report compiled from August 2006 to September 2007. The findings, which showed broadband use quadrupling nationwide from 2002 to 2007, shed a contrasting light on Roanoke's 2006 designation as the top digital city for its population size and Blacksburg's title as most-wired city in the world in the 1990s.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/158722