Pew Report on the Stimulus Plan and Broadband Adoption
What will it take to increase broadband adoption in the United States?
It looks like the economic recovery bill will include billions of dollars for broadband and wireless grants, and that prospect is raising even more questions than usual about what the best approach is to increasing connectivity -- particularly among those in unserved and underserved communities.
There are several key pieces to the broadband puzzle. Deployment and access are obviously essential, but you can't achieve the universal broadband nirvana that many of us would like to see without increasing demand and adoption.
John Horrigan of the Pew Internet and American Life Project published a report yesterday that cites price and availability as two main reasons why about 1/3 of the adult population in the U.S. is currently without broadband service.
Horrigan's analysis is based on survey data from two Pew studies, one from December 2007 that asked non-Internet users why they aren't online and another from May 2008 that asked dial-up users why they don't use broadband at home. He found that 35% of the dial-up users said that price was the reason they hadn't switched, while 19% said "nothing would make them switch" to broadband and another 16% admitted that they didn't know why they hadn't upgraded to broadband.
Among the non-Internet users surveyed, 33% reported that they simply weren't interested in going online, while 13% said they didn't have access (remember, the data was collected in December 2007).
As tough as it may be to fathom that there are people in the U.S. who do not want Internet access at home for one reason or another, it is a reality that policymakers, consumer advocates and industry will need to accept and understand in order to make the case for universal broadband. According to the Pew report, combining both sets of survey results revealed that 51% of respondents did not have broadband because they didn't see it as relevant; e.g. they were too busy, weren't interested, etc.
In addition to price, availability and relevance, Pew listed difficulty using the Internet as a reason some people gave for not getting online. Though the numbers in the Pew survey were relatively low (only 4% said they didn't have a computer at home), a lack of computer ownership is another factor to consider.
Horrigan concluded the following:
To be sure, targeted efforts to address infrastructure gaps and cost barriers could, within a few years, boost broadband adoption by as much as 10 percentage points. And one-third of existing broadband subscribers are low hanging fruit to adopt faster broadband soon after it is available. However, one-in-five Americans currently don't have broadband for reasons that won't be addressed by price cuts or a fiber node in the neighborhood. It will take time to get them up and running on broadband -- probably longer than the impacts of the stimulus package are intended to last.
You can download a PDF of Pew's report, and The Washington Post has more here.
It's also worth noting that the Pew report doesn't explore the growing role of wireless access, or the challenges Obama faces in delaying the digital TV transition that would free up spectrum for next-gen wireless networks.
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