Adoption

High-speed internet is not really available where the government says it is. And that misinformation means that a lot of Americans, especially those in poor and rural areas, can’t get access to broadband — a service that is becoming more and more integral to daily life in the US. “Currently in the US, the focus is upon physical infrastructure, not upon people choosing to subscribe or being able to subscribe,” said Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a nonprofit advocating for national broadband access.

While research on the impact of broadband continues to increase, a broad understanding of what being digital ready entails is missing. This study—based on a 1,214 nonrepresentative household survey weighted by income, age, and educational attainment—developed a digital readiness index (DRI) score based on three related but distinct dimensions: device & internet access (DIA), digital resourcefulness and utilization (DRU), and internet benefits and impact (IBI).

Income is the largest determinant of whether or not someone has access. Only 67 percent of households with less than $25,000 in income have access to a computer, and only 51.7 percent of them have access to internet. In comparison, households making between $50,000 and $99,999 had 93.9 percent of households with a computer and 86.2 percent with internet access. Income can determine whether a community needs to rely on the library for internet access. Rural communities with more low-income people have less home internet access.

In 2016, Free Press released Digital Denied, which showed that disparities in broadband adoption — commonly known as the digital divide —stem not only from income inequality, but from systemic racial discrimination. The report found that nearly half of all people in the country without home-internet access were people of color. Much of that gap was indeed the result of income inequality.

The Fiber Broadband Association and RVA, LLC released a new report on the rapid growth of the North American fiber broadband industry. Key findings include:

America continues to make significant strides in reducing the digital divide among school-age children. In 2017, 14 percent of the US population between ages 6 and 17 lived in homes with no Internet service, down from 19 percent in 2015. Still, significant challenges remain, especially for the approximately 7 million school-age children that lived in households without home Internet service in 2017.

According to the Federal Communications Commission’s last-published report, 24 million Americans lack access to high-speed internet service, with 19 million of them in rural areas. But last week the New York Times offered new numbers and they’re problematic, too. It found that 162 million people across the country do not use internet service at broadband speeds. There’s a big delta between 24 million and 162 million. 

A series of interactive maps to visualize home internet access, covering more than 65,000 occupied Census tracts in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. On the base maps, NDIA calculated and mapped two crucial data points from census data: 1) What percentage of households in each Census tract had no home internet access at all in 2017 — not even mobile internet or dial-up connections?  2) What percentage of households in each Census tract had “Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL” in 2017?