« Inhabiting the networked home | Main | Firefox adoption 1.0 - Should Firefox diffusion be more viral? »
16 November 2004
Broadband adoption – US - 1.0
One of the first things to know when trying to understand the social construction of the networked homes is how many households have set up a connection to the Internet, and among them how many have chosen to have a potentially always-on high-speed connection. The presence of such a connection is a clear indication that the household is engaged in the Information society as an active node of network.
However, even what looks like a simple question, e.g. what is the number of Internet homes as of November 2004, is in fact quite difficult to answer. To simplify things, I looked first at the US situation only.
How many US homes are connected to the Internet? And with which type of connection?
The number I came up with is that nearly 70 M US households are connected to the Internet; and somewhere between 25 and 30 M have Broadband access.
Here is how I came to that estimation. I used two kinds of data:
-
Survey data, the number of households with active Internet access, further decomposed in narrow or broadband connections
-
Business reports, the number of ISP subscribers to broadband connections. Notice that these numbers refer both to residential and small business subscriptions, and to Cable and DSL connections.
According to the US Census, in 2003 there were 111.3 M households in the US. At the end of the same year, market analyst eMarketer put the total number of online household at 68.3 M (eMarketer, November 2004) corresponding to an adoption rate of circa 61%. Of the 68.3 M Internet households, 24.8 M (36%) had a broadband connection. Similar estimations come from JD Power and associates' Internet Service Provider Residential Customer Satisfaction Study (TM). The study indicates that household Internet penetration is stabilizing at 66%, corresponding to a yearly growth of 2%. Broadband connections account for 39% of all Internet connections, what represents a 13% increase in a year.
Looking at the number of subscribers to broadband connections, the FCC indicates that there were 26 M broadband lines in service at the end of December 2003 (FCC, June 2004). This number however includes homes and small businesses. More recent estimates, that again don't distinguish between households and businesses, put the number of broadband subscribers at about 30 M. Quoting LRG eMarketer reports that the twenty largest cable and DSL providers in the US, accounting for about 95% of the market, have 30.9 million broadband Internet subscribers (LRG, 10th November); while the DSL Forum indicates that the total number of subscribers is 29.186 M (DSL Forum, 30th June).
The same fluctuation characterizes the statistics about the number of home Internet users who have broadband connections. They vary between 48 M and 65M. The Digital Future report and Nielsen//NetRatings converge to put the number of broadband home users at between 64 M (Nielsen//NetRatings, August 2004) and 65 M (Digital Future Report, December 2003). The Pew Internet Project makes a lower estimation at 48 M broadband adult home users. (Pew Internet Project, March 2004). Assuming that on average there are two Internet users per household, the estimation fluctuates again in a similar range of between 24 and 32 M households.
Where: US
When: December 2003 - September 2004
Posted at 12:22 PM in Usage at Home | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/1420725
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Broadband adoption – US - 1.0: