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.

Comments

Re:Isn't that -more- expensive?

[peragrin]

Wifi isn't mobile data. But wifi is a strange concept to no. Americans. You just aren't advanced enough yet.

Sarcasm aside the reasoning is simple. It is time consuming and expensive to star wire each house correctly. And most people don't do it correctly. The wiring shouldn't go into a closet, but to the basement or other location where utilities are. That way future owners or even yourself don't have to rewrite the home network just because you moved an office to a different room.

Older homes it is because pulling cabling to where you need it is a difficult process. And the cables are delicate especially compared to Romex.

Wifi is fast enough, and flexible enough and you need it anyways for your mobile devices.