New data: Americans are abandoning wired home Internet

For the most part, America's Internet usage trends can be summed up in a few phrases. The Internet is now so common as to be a commodity; the rich have better Internet than the poor; more whites have Internet than do people of color; and, compared with low-income minorities, affluent whites are more likely to have fixed, wired Internet connections to their homes. But it may be time to put an asterisk on that last point, according to new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In fact, Americans as a whole are growing less likely to have residential broadband, the figures show: They're abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet — and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web.

The study, which was conducted for the Commerce Department by the US Census Bureau, partly reaffirms what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to get online. In 2016 nearly one-third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That's up from 16 percent of households falling in that category in 2013. But even people with higher incomes are ditching their wired Internet access at similar or even faster rates compared with people who don't earn as much. In 2013, eight percent of households making from $50,000 to $75,000 a year were mobile-only. Fast-forward a couple years, and that figure now stands at 18 percent. Seventeen percent of households making from $75,000 to $100,000 are mobile-only now, compared with eight percent two years ago. And 15 percent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus six percent in 2013. Stepping back a bit, as many as one in five U.S. households are now mobile-only, compared with one in 10 in 2013. That's a doubling in just two years. This suggests that having only one form of Internet access instead of two may no longer be explained simply as the result of financial hardship — as might be the case for lower-income Americans — but could be the product of a conscious choice, at least for wealthier people, who are deciding that having both is unnecessary.