A first-of-its-kind federal survey of online access found that Americans in lower-income and rural areas often have slower Internet connections than users in wealthier communities.
he data, released Thursday by the Commerce Department, also found that 5 to 10 percent of the nation does not have access to connections that are fast enough to download Web pages, photos and videos.
Compiled in an online map that is searchable by consumers – assuming they have a fast enough broadband connection – the survey seems to confirm that there is a digital divide, something experts had suspected but lacked the data to prove.
Service in rural areas stinks. This is not exactly unexpected.
I wonder how much this study cost? Nice information, but I think we could have gone an entire lifetime without knowing it and nothing in the fabric of teh universe would have been interrupted. But it is soooo hard to cut government spending.
1. Unless one has DSL, which I do. My service isn’t exactly slow, by any means, and I live in a rural area……the San Joaquin Valley.
How are library services in those areas? And I’m talking about access to books, not the Internet. As wonderful as high speed Internet is, America is not in desparate need for more online shopping and Facebook posts.
Uh, rich people have nice things that poor people don’t have.
We needed a survey to show this?
Susan Peterson
As for books, really, anyone can have books if they want them. When our family income was half the federal poverty level, we had several thousand books in our house. Yard sales, library book sales, thrift stores-there are always inexpensive used books around. Having places to put them all, or time to read them, is much more of a problem.
I do admit that when the school expected students in the advanced classes to write their papers on computers (this was just before the internet really got started) and there was no time during the school day to do it, this was difficult for my kids. However soon after that one of my sons acquired a car full of outdated computer parts, and some bits were acquired at thrift store prices (like ten bucks) and pretty soon all of my kids had computers, if not current ones. They had dial up access to a local “bulletin board” via old slow modems. We did not even understand what they were doing. When my husband first heard the noise made when computers connect via modem he thought my son had broken the computer! The result of having to put all this stuff together is that two of my sons make a living in a computer related field although neither went to school for it, and a third could if he wanted to. Sweet are the uses of adversity.
Susan Peterson