The White House released a new broadband report Friday that's chock full of interesting information about the state of American broadband. A key chart, however, comes on page nine and shows the digital divide is still very, very real:
Approximately 91% of Americans as a whole have "access to wired broadband speeds of at least 10mbps downstream," the report found. But this chart shows a very different reality if you lack a college degree, if you're poor, if you're rural or if you're hispanic or African American.
Other data suggest minority groups are increasingly going online with mobile devices, perhaps making the above chart less relevant in their case. However, that's not true of rural residents, where mobile broadband is often slow and spotty if available at all. Here's another chart showing how bad the access problem is if you're out in the sticks:
More detail from the report:
Of great concern is also the disparity between urban and rural access, as well as uneven distribution of high-speed access across certain underserved geographies. Today, while almost 100 percent of urban residents have access to download speeds of at least 6 Mbps, only about 82 percent of residents in rural communities can access those speeds. The disparity is even more pronounced at higher speeds: almost 88 percent of urban residents have access to speeds of 25 Mbps, but less than half that percentage, about 41 percent, have access to those speeds in rural communities.
For low-income Americans, affordability is the (obvious) issue:
Cost represents a significantly greater obstacle for lower income Americans: compared to 18 percent of households with annual incomes above $50,000 that cited affordability as the main deterrent to going online, 32 percent of families with incomes below $25,000 responded that the high cost of Internet service prevented them from using broadband at home.
So the digital divide is still very real, especially for rural and poor Americans. As monied city dwellers get higher speeds and better connectivity, the rest of the country is getting left in the dust. Why is connectivity important? It's about the children:
Driven by new digital technologies, the future of learning is increasingly interactive, individualized, and full of real-world experiences and information. While broadband access hasimproved considerably in recent years, broadband infrastructure in America’s K-12 schools and local libraries has lagged far behind. Unfortunately, despite the successes of the FCC’s E-Rate program connecting schools to the Internet for the first time, oversubscription means that the average school has about the same connectivity than the average American home, but serves 200 times as many users, and fewer than 20 percent of educators say their school’s internet connection meets their teaching needs.