A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age
With computers now almost as common in American homes as cable television service, the Internet continues to expand in importance as a communication, information, entertainment, and transaction tool. One sure sign of growing reliance on this medium is the dramatic jump in high-speed, or broadband, Internet connections. The number of households willing to pay a premium over the cost of a basic dial-up connection for broadband access more than doubled between September 2001 and October 2003, growing from 9.9 million to 22.4 million. Underlying this growth is an evolution in the way people are connecting to the Internet. One in five (19.9 percent) U.S. households and over one-third (36.5 percent) of Internet households now have a high-speed connection, while the number of U.S. households using dial-up service declined by almost 13 percent between 2001 and 2003
These high-speed connections are becoming ever more central to accessing and relaying information quickly. Because of broadband’s increasing popularity, this report focuses on the growth of home broadband usage and the ways in which broadband users differ from dial-up users. The report finds that those with broadband at home are more intensive Internet users. Persons with broadband at home are more likely than other Internet users to use the Internet frequently and engage in a wider variety of online activities, such as entertainment and information gathering.
The report also examines the geographic differences in broadband adoption and the reasons why some Americans do not have high-speed service. The distribution of high-speed usage across economic and demographic categories, for the most part, follows the same patterns of variation that have been observed in the past in overall Internet use. One major difference, however, is in the pattern of geographic dispersion. Although the rate of Internet penetration among rural households (54.1 percent) is similar to that in urban areas (54.8 percent), the proportion of Internet users with home broadband connections remained much lower in rural areas than in urban areas.
High Speed Internet Tags: broadband internet, high speed internet
