PolicyBlog

I appeared as panelist at the FCC’s Adoption and Use Staff Seminar on August 19^th.  The panel was convened to look at patterns of broadband adoption, factors influencing adoption and ideas for increasing adoption.  My comments are outlined below.   I thought they might encourage further dialog and more ideas.

LINK

Adoption and Use Panel – Discussion Points

Broadband Adoption and Use

• Broadband is not just faster connections than dial-up.  It is also about “always on” connectivity as well. 
• Today, broadband allows people to stay connected – unlike the dial up era - and this has meant people are truly a “node” on the Internet and has allowed for a host of new applications to blossom.   Many do not take a lot of bandwidth but they have been transformative, like Instant Messaging for the hearing impaired.
• Both wired and wireless broadband connections are helping people access services they need.

Current State of Broadband Adoption and Use

• My assessment is that about 80% or almost 90 million households now have an Internet connection.  Some 70 million of those households have a broadband connection.  The rest have dial-up.  The remaining 20 million or so households have no connection to the Internet.
• Of these households, most could get dial-up access.  About half of them could get broadband connections.

Pertinent Trends in Broadband Adoption and Use

• Experts in technology adoption – like Pip Coburn – point out that adoption is not a simple case of price, choice and better technology.  As Coburn says “Change occurs when a user’s crisis is greater than their total perceived pain of adopting a possible solution.”
• What he means is that many technologies require us to learn how to adapt to and use them most effectively.  New technology, we all know from adopting new software, can sometimes feel threatening or even hopeless to use initially.
• (Slide One) – That said, broadband adoption has been one of the fastest technology adoption stories in our history and use of the technology has been growing very rapidly.   The latest Pew survey verifies that even in the last year, broadband adoption has jumped significantly on an overall basis in the U. S.
• (Slide Two) – Speeds have continued to increase over the last decade as well so that consumers have an ever more capable means of connecting to content and now creating it.   As a result of these trends, we now see consumers spending far more time online than ever as this chart demonstrates.

Drilling Down for Deeper Understanding

•  (Slide Three) - Looking at the data from Pew, Forrester and LRG, it appears that the following points about adoption are valuable insights:
• Seniors (those 64 and over which is 39 million people in 23 million households) have lower adoption rates (50 percent have Internet connections) and lower broadband connectivity (33 percent have broadband) than other age cohorts.  They spend the least time online than other cohorts.
• Gen Y (18-28 year olds) and Gen X (29-42 year olds) cohorts in general do virtually everything online.  They are connected by and large and will grow up that way.  That is 110 million adults and 44 million households.
• Income and education are factors that contribute to lower adoption.  Most homes with incomes above $75,000 are connected, but only half the homes with less than $30,000 in income are and only 37% of these homes are connected via broadband.
• Rural consumers have less broadband connectivity than consumers in suburban areas or urban areas.  This is partly because broadband is not as available and may be due to in part to lifestyles (i.e., more blue collar workers in rural areas who are not as exposed to online technologies at work).  It is also likely due to the fact that more seniors proportionately live in rural areas and often have lower, fixed incomes.
• While some ethnic groups (i.e., African Americans) are less connected at home proportionate to their population than other groups, many of these consumers at middle and upper income levels are connected at virtually the same levels as whites.   Some ethnic groups tend to be disproportionately represented in the low income population. 
• But here an interesting factor is that African Americans, for example, tend to use mobile broadband and data connections more than whites.  This is why I believe that it is not just about the home nor just about speed.  People are getting connected in varying ways and we don’t always appreciate that.

How Do We Help With These Challenges

• (Slide Four) – We are past the early adopters and the mass market adoption phases. We are now at the top of the adoption curve (see slide five) which is the most challenging part of any technology adoption process. So, we have some challenges remaining – primarily seniors, some rural consumers, and very low income consumers.
• As Coburn suggests, a piece of this is making the technology more adoptable and easier to transition to.  So, services online in general need to be improved.  Online Medicare applications take too much time and are not always intuitive. Studies from the University of Miami indicate that the web site for Medicare is difficult for many seniors to use, yet they are one of our most challenging cohorts.  We’ve got a long way to go in creating intuitive web sites.
• Second, around 9 million Americans are functionally deaf or hard of hearing.  Another 22 million Americans report vision loss which means individuals who have trouble seeing, even when wearing glasses or contact lenses, as well as individuals who are blind or unable to see at all.   Many of these people are in the “Seniors” cohort and these people can’t use typical technology to access the web.  We need to work harder to make it possible for them to do so.  Verizon now offers the “Talk” Blackberry which is a text to audio talking phone for the blind and sight impaired and we offer unlimited text messaging and web access plans for the hearing impaired and deaf that do not require or include voice service.   Why shouldn’t government think about text messaging access to its services and also other “mobile friendly” web services which often need to be reconfigured for mobile devices.  
• Finally, many of those not online – low income consumers, consumers whose jobs are in lines of work that do not require regular access to online services, and seniors – are simply not used to broadband technologies so focusing on both promoting computer ownership and training (possibly in public libraries for example) is a good strategy.