Rural Broadband – Catching up to Urban Broadband?

• January 22, 2010
• Paul Neiffer

Sort of like the photo of my motorcycle at the left, broadband Internet services are much faster than dial up (or in my case a Harley).  Historically, the utilization of broadband Internet services in the rural sector has been much lower than urban areas.

In an article in the September, 2009 Amber Waves , several observations about these issues were made.  By 2007, about 82% of the homes that had Internet service were using a broadband connection.  However, only 70% of rural areas had broadband which is about 15% behind urban utilization.  Clusters of very low service are located in the Dakotas, eastern Montana and Oregon and northern Minnesota.

An interesting conclusion was that rural counties that had broadband service on a quicker basis than other rural counties ended up with better job and economic growth than those without starting in  2000.  This difference in growth rates ranged up to 2% more in 2005 and 2006 and income levels were almost 3% higher in certain years.  Broadband service allows rural America to compete with urban areas since communicating at broadband electronic speeds shrinks the miles to almost nothing from a business standpoint.

Urban areas with low income levels still had broadband coverage of about 75% while rural areas with the same income only had about 50% penetration.  The gap for higher income levels in rural versus urban areas were much lower.

I am firm believer that countries such as Korea (with some of the fastest broadband service in the world), China, Brazil etc. that are deploying fast broadband service will catch up and possibly pass us much faster than if they did not have broadband.  This world is getting much flatter and the rural parts of America are catching up, but still have a ways to go.

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