Can you name a single government program that achieves 99 percent of its goals? And if any such program achieves 99 percent of its actual numeric goal, does it make any sense to say such an outcome is not worth cheering?
Where it comes to home broadband, if you pay attention to the actual numbers, the “unconnected” problem is a “last two percent of locations” issue, and always is. The actual size of the “cannot buy broadband” problem also is definitional. There are almost no continental U.S. home locations where internet access at “broadband” speeds is unavailable, if one includes satellite access among the relevant platforms.
That is why home broadband availability suffers in areas with lots of rural households and also tends to be best in urban areas.
In fact, one often sees descriptions of home broadband that are examples of innumeracy, such as the claim that 0.2 percent represents “so many” locations when it actually represents “so few.”
On the other hand, customer choice also is disregarded, though it is a huge factor in choices made about whether to buy home broadband services. 13 percent of households say they do not want to use the internet.
In addition to that, at least 15 percent of U.S. residents report they are mobile-only for their internet access. Assume that equates to about seven percent of households.
So add up those two categories--do not want to use the internet and use mobile for internet access--and you have as much as 20 percent of U.S. households that have good reasons for not buying home broadband services.
“Availability” is far less an issue.
The key issue is the oft-repeated insistence that something is a “big problem” when perhaps that is not the case. Problems can exist, and still not tell the story. One percent and two percent issues remain issues. But that should not obscure the main story, which is that 98 percent to 99 percent of instances are perhaps not problems at all.
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