The FCC has made clear that data will be a core component and driver of the upcoming National Broadband Plan, which is due to Congress on March 17th. To better meet their need for data, the FCC commissioned a survey to determine broadband adoption rates, the American public’s attitudes about broadband, and reasons why people may not subscribe to broadband. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski stood before a room filled with broadband policy stakeholders at the Brookings Institute yesterday to introduce FCC Consumer Research Director John Horrigan before he presented the results. The Chairman said he was “excited and proud of this development in our broadband work,” citing goals like remaining globally competitive, increasing our capacity to innovate, and embracing broadband for solving societal issues like education, healthcare, and the environment.
Horrigan started off by sharing some positive trends in adoption, including that 78% of Americans are Internet users and 65% use broadband at home, with increases among communities like Hispanics and rural-Americans. However, the 35% of those without broadband at home are the real concern, and as Genachowski said in his introduction, “there is no silver bullet to solving adoption.”
Horrigan took this survey as an opportunity to delve deeper into the non-adopter community. He had respondents list reasons for non-adoption that included general attitudes about broadband use to better understand and therefore address those issues. He also took the additional step of categorizing those people as “Digital Hopefuls,” “Near Converts,” “Digitally Distant,” and “Digitally Uncomfortable” to indicate their likelihood of conversion.
Watch the interview below with John Horrigan for more information and click here to read the results report in its entirety.
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April 1st, 2010 at 2:23 pm
[...] had broadband at home. Today over 60% have high-speed Internet at home (blogger’s note: many more have access, but choose not to adopt), making broadband “the norm of the Internet experience.” He then went into detail about what [...]