Rural areas always face challenges when it comes to home broadband, for simple reasons: the cost of fixed networks in areas of low population and housing density is challenging. But the latest survey data from NTCA suggests matters have improved dramatically.
The NTCA’s latest poll of its members indicates 61 percent of residents can buy service with downstream speeds of at least 1 Gbps, up from 55 percent in 2021, 45 percent in 2020, and 25 percent in 2019.
Customers unable to buy service at speeds up to 25 Mbps have dropped to about nine percent.
The 2021 report indicated as much as 76 percent of customers are able to buy services running from 100 Mbps to multi-gigabit speeds. About 55 percent of customers were in the “1 Gbps or faster” category.
There are issues, to be sure. One might argue that non-reporting firms probably support lower speeds than the 38 percent of rural ISPs that responded to the survey request. Keep in mind that the respondents report an average of 4,287 residential and 648 business fixed broadband connections in service.
It is likely that most of the non-responders are even smaller entities. In other words, as in most markets, it is likely that a small subset of ISPs in the U.S. rural ISP market represent most of the total potential customers.
The important takeaway is that rural home broadband is improving fast and already is on a par with urban service levels in many cases. That is not the impression a casual observer might get if reading, seeing or hearing about the digital divide in news reports.
As often is the case, reality can be distorted unless “both sides of the story” are told.
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