Posts Tagged ‘broadband adoption’

Broadband access to the Internet has become a fact of life for many Americans.  We use it to find critical information.  We use it to stay in touch with friends and loved ones.  And we learn and study with it.  It has, in many ways, revolutionized how we teach and learn, on the job, at school, and at home.

The cable industry is the largest provider of broadband in America with our high-speed networks available to 93% of U.S. homes. And even though 77 million U.S.

The latest Pew Internet and American Life Project report on broadband provided some fairly predictable results but ones that can still be useful in determining how we approach broadband policy issues in the coming months.

The National Broadband Plan has put the spotlight squarely on getting broadband service to the roughly 35% of U.S. households that don’t subscribe.  I don’t think anyone can disagree with this overarching goal, and it’s clear that it will take a multi-pronged approach to bridge this gap.

As mentioned previously, we were attending the Personal Democracy Forum earlier this week. Winding up Monday’s session was a panel entitled “The Obama Broadband Initiative and the Future of the Internet,” with opening remarks by Blair Levin of the FCC (video here) and a discussion, moderated by PDF’s Andrew Rasiej, involving Free Press’ Josh Silver, NCTA’s James Assey, and AT&T’s Hank Hultquist.

Rarely a day goes by in DC without a panel discussion, new report or legislative hearing on the importance of broadband. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a lengthy survey on Home Broadband Adoption.

The handwringing about broadband adoption in the US continues unabated with yet another group calling for either some sort of government intervention or some form of nationalization (though Vint Cerf now claims he was joking – mostly).