Report on Broadband in America

The e-Vermont Community Broadband Project is just one of many broadband adoption programs funded with help from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). How has the national work to increase broadband usage been going? The NTIA recently released a report on current statistics and trends.

According to NTIA, 70% of American households used the Internet in 2009 and 64% of American households were using broadband for their access while the remainder relied on lower speed connections. However, only 51% of rural households used broadband. In fact, even after accounting for economic, educational, and occupational differences,  urban households were still more likely to use broadband than rural ones.

In Vermont the percentage of households using broadband at home in 2009 was 61%, up from 8% in 2001. According to the Vermont Telecommunications Authority, approximately 75% of Vermonters have access to broadband.

The NTIA study also divided respondents into Internet users and Internet non-users. For organizations like e-Vermont that promote broadband usage, this distinction is important. People who use the Internet somewhere but don't subscribe to broadband at home ranked affordability as the primary reason. People who don't use the Internet at all listed lack of need or interest as their primary reason for not subscribing at home, and these non-users represent two-thirds of those without household broadband subscriptions. 

You may also be interested in reading these NTIA findings alongside the National Broadband Plan, released earlier this year by the Federal Communications Commission. While NTIA's recent findings focus on the profile of Americans using / not using Internet resources, the FCC report focuses more on the technology and its applications, laying out a plan for extending modern communications tools.

These two documents create the most up to date snapshot of the future of broadband development nationwide. Keep following this blog to learn about how that future is emerging in Vermont.