Monday, February 5, 2007

New FCC report: Ohio 28th among states in home broadband lines

(Rich James referred to this in his last couple of posts...)

Last Thursday the Federal Communications Commission released its semi-annual report on High-Speed Services for Internet Access. This one surveyed the number of "high speed" connections by state, user type, provider type, etc. as of June 30 2006. (I'm putting quotation marks around "high speed" because the FCC threshold is a paltry 200 kbps in one direction. But trust me, most of what they're counting is regular DSL and cable modem service.)

Table 13 tells us the number of residential high-speed Internet lines by state, with the District of Columbia and a couple of territories thrown in. If you take these figures for the fifty states and D.C. and line them up against the Census Bureau's 2005 household counts, here's what you find:

  • Just 40% of Ohio's 4.5 million households had broadband Internet access in June 2006. This leaves three out of five Ohio homes -- 2.7 million -- without broadband Internet access, even by the FCC's ridiculously low standard.
  • This rate of household broadband penetration puts Ohio 28th among the fifty states -- 29th if you include D.C. in the ranking. Our state's rate is 5% below the national average.

I've posted the whole state-by-state spreadsheet here.

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