Broadband Access is About More Than "Home"

It's always difficult to assess the state of broadband access, in the United States or anywhere else, when multiple forms of access are available. In Austria, for example, wireless increasingly seems to be preferred for broadband access. In the United States, it might be worth noting that people access the Internet, using broadband, in all sorts of ways beyond the connections they use at home.

Fully 74 percent of respondents to a survey conducted by Connect South Carolina indicate they use broadband at home. But an additional 33 percent also report they use it at work, while 16 percent say they use broadband provided by a public library.

About 12 percent say they use broadband at someone else's home, seven percent, five percent at schools, three percent at hotels, two percent at airports and two percent at community centers.

More broadband use at home, virtually everybody would agree, is a good thing. The point is that people already seem to be using broadband in a variety of ways that suggest a narrow focus only on at-home broadband does not tell the whole story. About 54 percent of respondents say they use broadband at some location other the home.

About four percent of respondents say they use mobile broadband for their notebook computers or PCs, about 20 percent say they have mobile broadband on their smartphones, while five percent say they have both smartphone broadband and a separate PC access subscription.

view the full results here