Broadband may be growing faster than we think

In a market as big as the U.S., it's easy for market realities to get ahead of data

As it is, and may always be, with science: We still don't know what we don't know. Turns out it's the same with technology, as demonstrated in recent Pew Research reports about broadband.

Perhaps all the hand-wringing about slow adoption and deployment of broadband services in the U.S. is because we commit the sin of comparing ourselves with others. The dynamics in the U.S. market are different from countries where broadband deployment rates are through the roof. We don't have 100 million people stacked on top of one other in our cities.

So perhaps we should compare ourselves only to ourselves. If we did, we would find — as Pew Research did in its fall study of how government agencies measure broadband — that we are deploying broadband faster than any other major consumer technology since 1961, when The Wonderful World of Disney was broadcast in color.

Pew said the personal computer took almost twice as long to reach a 50% market saturation point than broadband. The PC took 18 years; broadband reached 50% in September, only 10 years after it became widely available.

“The quick pace at which high-speed Internet has found its way into Americans' homes stands in sharp contrast to how government statistical agencies have adapted to measuring broadband,” said John Horrigan, associate director of research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

While the U.S. may rank 15th on the international adoption list, the technology is being adopted faster than the cellular phone, which took 15 years to reach the 50% mark.

Horrigan said broadband misperceptions are widespread but acute at the local level. Why? There is not enough reliable data from which to take an accurate measure.

“Rural communities may want to do something about the lack of broadband infrastructure, but many don't have the data to tell them precisely where deployment gaps exist,” Horrigan said in his report. “There are no systematically collected and publicly available sources of data on adoption and deployment of broadband at the local level.”

(continued on next page)