The poor care about broadband

There's an allegedly stubborn portion of the population -- mostly poor, rural, and older -- who don't use the Internet at all, because they supposedly don't care to do so. But a new study suggests that this community of broadband outsiders is rapidly disappearing from the landscape, particularly among low income Americans.

"We found no such group," concludes the Social Science Research Council, "even among respondents with profound histories of marginalization -- the homeless, people with long-term disabilities, people recently released from lengthy prison sentences, non-English speakers from new immigrant communities, and residents of a rural community without electricity or running water. No one needed to be convinced of the importance of Internet use or of the value of broadband adoption in the home." It may be that SSRC's staff didn't find these blasé types because their sample size was much smaller than the National Telecommunications & Information Agency's recent survey of 'Net use (based on census queries of 54,000 households), or last year's Pew study concluding that two-thirds of those without broadband just don't want it. But the report -- "Broadband Adoption and Low Income Communities" -- is backed up with interviews that are of much greater depth than either of those previous studies. Produced for the Federal Communications Commission, the new study confirms the trend that the NTIA report hinted at: disinterest is taking a back seat to unaffordability, uncertainty, lack of equipment, and lack of skill. More worrisome is SSRC's identification of a new category in the broadband sociosphere: "un-adopters"—households that once had high speed Internet, then dropped the service because they could not afford it any more.