ResourceBlog Article: Broadband in America: New FCC Report Shows Nearly 20% of U.S. is “Digitally Uncomfortable” or “Digitally Distant"

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Monday, 22nd February 2010

Broadband in America: New FCC Report Shows Nearly 20% of U.S. is “Digitally Uncomfortable” or “Digitally Distant"

Amy Schatz writes:

Less than a month before the Federal Communications Commission is set to release its voluminous plan for bringing high-speed Internet to all Americans, the agency is out with a new report profiling which Americans are the least likely to be broadband subscribers.

[Access the Complete F.C.C. Report: Broadband Use Adoption in America (53 pages, PDF)]

About 35% of Americans aren’t using high-speed Internet at home, the FCC says.

[Snip]

To better target future, if unannounced, government programs designed to get Americans online, the agency produced profiles of the most likely non-subscribers:

Digitally Distant: About 10% of the U.S. population falls into this category, the FCC estimates, including a high-proportion of Americans 63 and older. About half of the Digitally Distant are retired and say they don’t subscribe because they either don’t know how to use a PC or don’t see the point of the Internet

Digital Hopefuls: Americans who’d like to subscribe but don’t have the money for high-speed service (which averages $41/month, according to the survey). The Digital Hopefuls make up about 8% of the population. The group is heavily Hispanic (26%), particularly non-English speaking Hispanics, or African-American (20%). Some Digital Hopefuls have PCs but others are digitally illiterate, the FCC says.

Digitally Uncomfortable: Take a Digital Hopeful, add more cash and you have this group, which can afford high-speed Internet service but don’t subscribe. “Nearly all of the Digitally Uncomfortable have computers, but they lack the skills to use them and have tepid attitudes toward the Internet,” according to the report. They make up about 7% of the population.

Near Converts: These are mostly dial-up Internet users who balk at paying $40 a month for broadband access, the FCC says. Relatively young (a median age of 45), they account for about 10% of the population and include Americans who use high-speed Internet at work for online shopping and such.

Access the Complete Article

Source: Digits (Wall St. Journal)

The study, conducted last fall, interviewed 5,005 residents by telephone. It indicates that the gap in access is no longer between slower dial-up and faster broadband; the overwhelming majority of people who have Internet access have broadband.

“Overall Internet penetration has been steady in the mid-70 to upper 70 percent range over the last five years,” Mr. Horrigan said in an interview on Monday. “Now we’re at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-Internet-users.”

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