Sometimes what it seems as if the good news really isn’t good news. Pew just released survey results today showing that the percentage of Americans with “high-speed broadband” home connections has increased from 66 to 70 since April 2012. Pew calls this a “small but statistically significant increase “. The report also shows that 32 percent of people without “high-speed broadband” home connections (or another 10 percent of Americans) have a smartphone.
News of an overall increase in “high-speed broadband” adoption will likely be heralded by America’s communications giants and policymakers as the silver lining: “We’re not doing so bad!” But before you start celebrating, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the results.
For starters, Pew’s results show that the digital divide is persistent, with close correlations between socioeconomic status and home Internet access. The report is also a reminder that policymakers use the words “high-speed broadband” to include anything other than dial-up access, which is too broad a definition.
In fact, we have set an alarmingly low bar for ourselves: The United States should dominate the information-centric global economy, but we won’t unless we raise our standards.
The digital divide here in the United States
According to the report, nearly 90 percent of college graduates have access to high-speed Internet at home, as do households earning more than $75,000. Compare that to only 37 percent of those who have not completed high school, as well as 54 percent of households with incomes less than $30,000, who have that access.
Racial disparities also remain: Blacks and Latinos are less likely to have access to high-speed Internet than whites.
Pew notes that many blacks and Latinos have smartphones, making their “high-speed broadband” adoption numbers about the same as whites,* if *smartphone access is included in “broadband “.
Don’t call me “high speed broadband”
Both the Pew study and the FCC label any connection of 4 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads as fast enough to be counted as “broadband.” That’s absurd.
[#contributor: /contributors/5932739a2a990b06268aab71]|||Susan Crawford is a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and an adjunct professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at Columbia University. He is also a member of the Roosevelt Institute. Crawford has been a member of the ICANN board and special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy. She is the author of *[Captive Audience](http://www.amazon.com/Captive-Audience-Telecom-Industry-Monopoly/dp/0300153139): The telecommunications industry and monopoly power in the new golden age*.|||
It is also dangerous to call everything “broadband” because it allows us to pretend that there is a vibrant market for high-speed Internet access, in which satellite competes with cable modem access, wireless mobile telephony supplants the need for a cable at home, and there is no need for supervision or change in industrial policy.
Yes, you could say that DSL, satellite, and mobile are all “high-speed broadband,” but that’s like putting your local high school football team in the same market as the New York Giants. It’s all football, but the two do not compete (nor can they).
Let’s use Netflix as an example of what happens when today’s DSL (over copper phone lines) is included in “high-speed broadband.”
The minimum recommended speed for streaming a single DVD-quality Netflix movie is 3 Mbps (and 5 Mbps for a single HD-quality movie). DSL connections that enable download speeds of at least 3 Mbps account for less than 20 percent of fixed connection subscriptions in the US and less than 9 percent of 5 Mbps subscriptions.
If, God forbid, you wanted to use two devices in your house at the same time to watch two HD movies at once, you would need a 10Mbps connection, and DSL simply won’t do the job. Less than 3 percent of fixed-line subscriptions in the US that are capable of reaching speeds of 10 Mbps are DSL, but all of them would be included in Pew’s (and FCC’s) definition of “high-speed broadband.” .
