BLUE STATE

The nation's broadband divide mirrors its political geography, according to a recent study from Leichtman Research. Only eight U.S. states have a broadband penetration greater than 35%, the study found, and all of them cast their electoral votes for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Conversely, only 11 states have a broadband penetration at or below 20%, and George W. Bush carried all of them. Leichtman attributes the pattern to more predictable links to household incomes, but unfortunately, the data will probably be used to stoke the embers of the red state/blue state culture quarrel. Like most state electoral map stereotypes, however, the notion of broadband as somehow characteristically liberal (like lattés or tofu) is more full of holes than a Florida punch-card ballot. An even more recently released study — this one from the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, a nonpartisan West Coast think tank — declared the most conservative city in America to be none other than Provo, Utah, whose residents demanded an innovative municipal fiber-to-the-premises network (the same kind those high-tech hippies in Palo Alto, Calif., were too cautious to adopt). The fifth most conservative city in the U.S., according to the same study, is Plano, Texas, the American headquarters of Alcatel, the world's premier supplier of broadband access equipment. (America's most liberal towns, Detroit and Gary, Ind., aren't exactly synonymous with broadband.) And don't forget: Folks in Bush country got Verizon's FiOS first — in Keller, Texas, where, incidentally, you don't have to go far to get a great latté.