Home Broadband Penetration Up 40 Percent In Past Year
Washington, D.C. -- May 29, 2006 -- Adoption of high-speed Internet at
home grew twice as fast in the year prior to March 2006 than in the same
time frame from 2004 to 2005, according to a report of the Pew Internet
& American Life Project, titled "Home Broadband Adoption 2006."
Middle-income Americans accounted for much of the increase, along with
African Americans and new Internet users coming online with broadband at
home. At the end of March 2006, 42 percent of Americans had high-speed
at home, up from 30 percent in March 2005, or a 40 percent increase.
Among Americans in the middle-income range - those whose household
incomes are between $40,000 and $50,000 per year - home high-speed
penetration grew by 68 percent from 2005 to 2006.
Other sources of broadband growth were:
* African Americans, whose home broadband penetration grew by 121
percent, from 14 percent of all adults to 31 percent with high-speed at
home,
* New Internet users; overall online penetration grew by seven
percentage points, from 66 percent to 73 percent, and nearly half of
these Americans new to the Internet got broadband.
The Pew Internet survey also documents an important marketplace shift:
Telephone companies offering less-expensive digital subscriber line
(DSL) connections have overcome the once-sizeable lead that cable
companies had in the broadband market. DSL accounted for 50 percent the
home broadband market in our latest data while cable modem providers had
41 percent. This is an exact reversal of market shares from a year
earlier, and DSL has a significant price advantage over cable modem
service. Subscribers to DSL service at home report a $32 monthly bill,
compared to $41 for cable modem users. These aggressive pricing
strategies paid off for DSL providers; DSL won the bulk of the new
business from high-growth population segments.
"The early adoption phase of broadband-to-the-home is behind us," said
John B. Horrigan, Associate Director for Research and principal author
of the report. "As broadband moves beyond the elite, so does an online
activity once largely the province of early adopters - posting content
to the Internet."
Some 48 million Internet users have put some sort of content for the
Internet - whether that's maintaining a webpage or sharing creative work
online. Three-quarters of those who post content to the Internet have
high-speed Internet connections at home. Young people have the most
likely sources of user-generated content, but this activity is evenly
distributed across income groups, by gender, and levels of education.
"The mainstreaming of high-speed, in combination with user-generated
content being a widespread phenomenon, suggests that individuals will
continue to shape the Internet," said Horrigan said. "This means that an
Internet that permits open access to lawful content is of great value to
the tens of millions of Americans who post their creative work online."
In August 2005, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a policy
statement entitled New Principles Preserve the Open and Interconnected
Nature of Public Internet which included the principle that "consumers
are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." The
current debate in Congress about network neutrality pertains to whether,
or in what form, additional regulatory or legislative action is
necessary to maintain this policy principle as high-speed networks evolve.
The new Pew Internet report also contains data on awareness and home
adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services. As
of the end of 2005, 61 million Americans say they have heard of the
service - up by 86 percent since February 2004 - and approximately 3
percent of Internet users have VoIP service at home. Of those with VoIP
at home, about half have given up their traditional landline phone.
The Pew Internet Project's report on broadband adoption is based on the
Project's March 2006 survey of 4,001 Americans, 1,562 of whom were home
broadband users. Comparisons to March 2005 are based on the Project's
combined January-March 2005 surveys of 4,402 adults, of whom1,265 were
home broadband users. Data on user-generated content, monthly cost of
service, and VoIP are drawn from the Project's December 2005 survey of
3,011 Americans, of whom 1,014 were home high-speed users.
View full report -- "Home Broadband Adoption 2006." (PDF format)
http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/PIP_Broadband_0506.pdf
The Pew Internet Project is a non-profit, non-partisan initiative of the
Pew Research Center that produces reports exploring the impact of the
Internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools,
health care, and civic/political life. Support for the non-profit Pew
Internet Project is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Source: Pew
Link below;
http://www.internetadsales.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7635
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