Feb 18, 2011 1:19 PM,

NTIA report: Income-related digital divide is narrowing

By Joan Engebretson

Gains also made in narrowing urban/ rural gap

The U.S. is making progress in addressing some aspects of the “digital divide” between people who use broadband and those who don’t, according to a report issued yesterday by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration. The income-related gap between users and non-users is narrowing, as is the urban/rural gap, the report--based on data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau--found.

More on this Topic

Industry News

Blogs

Briefing Room

According to the report, broadband adoption by people with family income between $15,000 and $25,000 grew 21% between October 2009, when 35.2% of people in that category used broadband at home, and 2010 when that percentage was 42.6%. But the adoption rate for people in the $100,000-$149,000 annual household income category increased only 1% during the same period—from 84.9% to 85.5%.

“A time-series comparison suggests that this form of digital divide is slowing shrinking,” the report states.

The urban/ rural gap
As for the rural/urban divide, the report found a gap of 10.1 percentage points between the urban broadband usage rate of 70.3% and the rural rate of 60.2% for 2010—a decrease from the 11.8 percentage point difference in 2009, when the urban usage rate was 60.2% and the rural rate was 54.1%. Three years earlier, the gap was 15 percentage points (53.8% versus 38.8%).

On a related note, the report found that population density affected the reasons why some people don’t use broadband. Although the top-ranked reason for both urban and rural areas was “don’t need/ not interested,” respondents in rural areas were more liked to say broadband wasn’t available (9.4% vs. 1%). Urban non-users, meanwhile were more likely to say they could use broadband somewhere outside the home (5.4% versus 3.7%).

Overall, of those who use broadband outside the home, 40.2% said they used it at work, 27.3% said they used it at school and 11% said they used it at the public library. Of the other places where people said they used broadband—community centers, Internet cafes, and other peoples’ homes—none were cited by more than 10% of respondents.