Data shows bad economy couldn't stop broadband growth

The Federal Communications Commission's new status report for high-speed Internet services indicates that broadband adoption in the United States grew in 2008 by ten percent, to a total of 77 million fixed-location broadband connections. That's in contrast to 2007, when fixed broadband subscribership rose by 17 percent. You can read 2008's slower pace as a sad commentary on the nation's oft-lamented rate of broadband penetration. Or you can interpret it as good news, considering that consumers kept buying relatively fast Internet connections through a year when the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate, well, didn't grow, to put it politely. GDP began at a tepid 2.1 percent in January of '08 and dropped to 5.4 degrees below zero by January '09, then got even worse in the next fiscal quarter.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate began its unpleasant march from 4.8 percent in March to 7.4 percent in December of that year, then got even worse (as you doubtless noticed). So it's a testimony to how much people want broadband that they kept their subscriptions or bought a new one through those scary months. Plus at the year end of 2008, 25 million mobile device owners had a high-speed data plan for their laptop or smartphone, the FCC reports. That's out of 86 million people who bought some kind of mobile gadget that could send and receive broadband data. We don't know whether that figure represents net growth, because 2008 is the first year that the Commission has set up a coordinated count for the mobile cohort.