The connection: broadband adoption and income
If people made more money in Baltimore, would our city's broadband adoption rate be better?
This is one question that arose while I put together a story about Baltimore, the desire for better broadband, and the city's recent application for the Google Fiber project.
I found recently released data from the FCC that showed broadband adoption among communities across the country, and I was able to compare Baltimore to other Maryland jurisdictions and other big and small cities. Baltimore, for the most part, lags when compared with its peers. In Maryland, the city has about the same rate of broadband adoption as its most rural areas.
Below is a table featuring Maryland jurisdictions sorted by median income, high to low. The connections column refers to connections per 1,000 households.
What do you think?
Comments
Couple questions (you probably can't answer) but here goes:
* besides income do any other factors (e.g. education) appear to influence connections?
* does connection price have any influence?
* does competition have any influence on connections? (e.g. when you can choose between DSL, Cable and FIOS does that help increase connections?)
Oh and is the raw data available from the FCC?
Posted by: Paul | March 29, 2010 10:56 AM
Paul's comments are a good one, and I think the third bullet about competition is an important one.
That said, seeing that household income can be correlated to connectivity density, for lack of a better term, is not surprising.
I would be curious, though, to see what the different types of connectivity are--going deeper than the number of connected households. What kind of connectivity are these households using: the cheap and nearly ubiquitous 1 Mbps DSL option, the speediest DSL option, the most expensive cable connection speed, etc.? I think this data would also get to Paul's second bullet.
The only problem I have with this data as it is presented here is that it can be spun in many different directions.
JJT and Paul -- here's the link to the FCC webpage that features different data sets. http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/comp.html
Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of independent granular data yet that the FCC offers. Most telecom operators keep their data about their customers to themselves. But the data I refer to shows the minimal broadband adoption by jurisdiction. -GS
Posted by: JJT | March 29, 2010 11:17 AM