Thousands in San Francisco Bay Area lack broadband access

While many San Francisco Bay Area (CA) residents can get home Internet access at blazingly fast speeds, tens of thousands of others in the region lack basic access to wired broadband, a report released by the Federal Communications Commission showed.

In the Bay Area, Marin County residents are those most likely to not be able to get a wired broadband connection. Sonoma, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties also have large numbers of residents that lack access. The numbers and percentages of residents lacking broadband access varies widely among the nine Bay Area counties. At the high end, there's Marin, where some 9,952 residents -- about 4 percent of the county's population -- can't get wired broadband, according to the FCC report. Sonoma, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties each had at least 6,000 residents that lacked broadband access at home. On the other extreme, there's San Francisco, where every one of its 817,287 residents can get home broadband access if they desire it. Santa Clara and Napa counties each had fewer than 700 residents that lacked broadband access.