Understanding Broadband Un-adopters

As the Federal Communications Commission seeks to modernize the Lifeline program to include a broadband subsidy for low-income Americans, new research explains why some people drop home broadband service after trying it and recommends policies to help improve adoption rates in these households. In an upcoming paper for Telecommunications Policy, we present findings from our recent study of broadband un-adopters – those who have had their household Internet connections discontinued. These households represent an important piece of the overall broadband adoption picture, since they have experienced the Internet at home but ultimately did not maintain the connection. Given the recent Pew Research Center findings of a slight drop in home broadband adoption in 2015, future policy efforts should benefit from a deeper understanding of why households terminate their service. Our study takes a comprehensive look at these un-adopting households, including assessing how common this practice is across income levels, and also looks at the underlying reasons for stopping their broadband connections. Using data from the nationally-representative Current Population Survey, we find that these “un-adopters” comprised 12% of all households without broadband service as of 2013. From another perspective, approximately 4% of households nationwide with a broadband connection have become “un-adopters” – though, as expected, this rate of un-adoption is much more common among lower-income households.

[Brian Whitacre is an Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University. Colin Rhinesmith is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Faculty Research Fellow with the Benton Foundation.]