Friday, March 3, 2006

Rural America Lags In High Speed Internet

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new study that shows that rural Americans still lag in the number of high speed internet connections, but that the gap is rapidly narrowing. The study, released this week, showed that only 24% of rural Americans have high speed Internet connections at home, compared with 39% of urban and suburban dwellers. The study did find that the number of homes with high speed internet increased dramatically from 2003, where only 9% of rural Americans had broadband at home. In 2003, 22% of urban and suburban dwellers had high speed Internet, meaning that the gap has closed significantly between the two. Overall, including dial up and connecitons from home, rural America only lagged the rest of the country by 8 percentage points (62% versus 70%).