Since broadband first became widely available to consumers in the late 1990s, adoption has hit thehalfway point faster than most other information and communication technologies.
It took 18 years for the personal computer to be used by 50 percent of Americans at home and 18 years for color TV to reach half of homes.
Mobile phone penetration took 15 years to reach the "half of homes" point. It took 14 years for the video cassette recorder, and 10 and one half years for the compact disc player to reach the same level of penetration.
It has taken about 10 years for broadband to reach 50 percent of homes. We can argue about the price of broadband, the definition of broadband, the quality or terms of service under which broadband can be purchased.
But it continues to surprise me that some observers still think there is some sort of crisis or problem here. Over the last year bandwidths have been leaping, not just incrementally increasing. There's more third generation wireless access, more WiMAX, more Wi-Fi. With a new SpaceWay satellite in orbit, there's much more satellite broadband capacity coming online as well.
And the last time I checked, some 98 percent of U.S. homes had access to at least one wireline broadband provider, and depending on where the location is, one or two satellite providers. Again, depending on location, users have access to one to three broadband mobile networks as well.
Few countries save Japan have prices-per-megabit lower than U.S. consumers do. By all means let us solve problems. But it doesn't do much good to keep trying to "solve" problems that already are in the process of being fixed.
And by any historical standard broadband access is a product being adopted by U.S. consumers at a faster rate than other highly-popular innovations have. In fact, one would be hard pressed to name another popular innovation that has penetrated the market so quickly.
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