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Americans Abandoning Wired Home Internet, Shows Study (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Americans as a whole are growing less likely than before to have residential broadband, according to new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In plain English, they're abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet -- and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web. The study, conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau, partly upholds what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to get online. Today nearly a third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That's up from 16 percent in 2013. They're often cited as evidence of a digital divide; families with little money to afford a home Internet subscription must resort to free Wi-Fi at libraries and even McDonald's to do homework, look for jobs and find information. But people with higher incomes are ditching their wired Internet access at similar or even faster rates. In 2013, 8 percent of households making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year were mobile-only. Fast-forward a couple of years, and that figure is 18 percent. Seventeen percent of households making between $75,000 and $100,000 are mobile-only now, compared with 8 percent two years ago. And 15âpercent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus 6 percent in 2013.
It's true that population densities are very low here, and that it is more difficult to connect everyone up as a result. However, it's also true that we could be doing a lot more in that regard.
I see you are responding (in advance) to the lame excuse routinely offered by apologists for "Whatever the Corporations Give Us Must Be the Best in The World! Because FREEDOM!"
The poor average Internet service in the U.S., both in wired broadband penetration and internet connection speeds (and metrics like cost per bandwidth), cannot be explained (or even correlated with) population density. The U.S. is 82.4% urbanized for one thing, which means that this entire urban population lives in a small area at high densities and should have data service comparable or better than the rest of the world, especially in light of the relatively high U.S. average income. The population density in U.S. urban areas is 2400 people per square mile, far higher than the average population density of the nations with the best Internet service (like South Korea), and are in addition highly regionalized (i.e. are in effect huge megacities) so that they do form population and wealth concentrations similar to those top Internet nations.
Instead we are far behind such very low density countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland in all BB metrics (our urbanization rate is not much different from these countries, BTW). Canada, with a lower rate of urbanization that the U.S., and a population density about 1/10 that of the U.S. does better in broadband access, and has nearly identical data rates.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Don't think so. You can get good coverage in Europe in thinly populated places too. It's the competition, plus strict rules, e.g. you have to provide service to 99% of the population 3 years after you get your frequency slot license, or you loose it and forfeit the billions you paid for the license.
And yes, nordic countries like Norway (14 humans/sq km) Sweden (24 h/sqkm) and Finland (18h/sqkm) do have better mobile coverage and prices, while having a lower population density than the US (35h/sqkm).
There is almost no place in the world which is populated which has population densities as low as the USA.
Finland's population density according to World Bank's population density table is half that of the United States, with Sweden between them. Yet I'm told Sweden and Finland have better home Internet connectivity than the United States.