Broadband Now: Rural Adoption March 4th, 2009
Portia Krebs

With seven billion dollars committed to speeding broadband deployment, President Obama’s stimulus package makes clear that increasing U.S. broadband adoption is a legislative priority.  Crucial to this national goal, our latest edition of Broadband Now takes a look at rural connectivity, focusing on the status of rural access and solutions to speed broadband-driven opportunities.Highlights include:

• Nearly 40% of rural Americans have broadband at home, and adoption is accelerating with 25% year-over-year growth.
• Less than 1 in 5 rural Americans say they aren’t connected to high-speed Internet because it isn’t available; rather, most say they don’t need the Internet, or cannot use or do not own a computer.
• Innovative public-private partnerships like Connect Kentucky address technology literacy and seek to remove all barriers to access.  As a result of this collaboration, Kentucky’s broadband availability has spiked from 60% to 95%, as well as benefited from 18,000 new IT jobs that have kept more residents in state.
• New wireless long-term evolution (LTE) technology also holds promise to help bridge the digital divide, offering networks as fast and reliable as wired options.

Click on the video for more on rural broadband adoption.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Benefits of Broadband, Broadband Now, Vidcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.