The broadband adoption dilemma

At Supercom, a trade show taking place in Chicago, panelists highlighted low broadband adoption rates as a major issue that must be addressed in the pending National Broadband Plan which will outline how the U.S. can reach the goal of universal broadband use. Roughly 96 percent of American households have access to broadband service from at least one service provider, the FCC said in a status report issued last month. But of those people, about 33 percent do not subscribe to broadband. Why? John Horrigan, consumer research director for the FCC, who was on the panel Wednesday, said the FCC is currently conducting surveys to answer that question. "We are trying to figure out why people who have access to broadband choose not to subscribe," Horrigan said. "There's a big group of users still on dial-up, and there are people who have never subscribed to an Internet service." The FCC's status report suggests that adoption rates vary by age, income, education, and race. There is some speculation that price might be a factor, which means either the cost of services is too high or the cost of computers and equipment is too high. Jim Cicconi, a senior executive vice president at AT&T, said that there are a mix of reasons why people who have access to broadband choose not to subscribe. And he argued that price may not play as big of a role as some people suspect. He said that after AT&T merged with BellSouth, the company introduced a $10-a-month broadband service to entice people to subscribe to broadband [Editor's note: actually, that was a condition of the merger]. While many customers signed up for this offer, there was still a significant number of people who didn't. In fact, some consumers continued to subscribe to dial-up service, even though that service was much slower and twice as expensive as broadband.