Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

FCC: 22% of U.S. adults don’t use the internet

Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by No comments yet

How many people in the United States use the internet?  Everybody… right?  Well… it seems that way sometimes, but there are millions of us who don’t.  I’m sure we can all think of a few.  Greg Sterling shares today about a new FCC study that pegs it at 22% of U.S. adults… that’s a big slice!  From Greg…

The US FCC has released a report, based on a survey of more than 5,000 US consumers in November… interesting findings… I’ve quickly selected (verbatim from the report):

  • 78 percent of adults are Internet users, whether that means broadband, dial-up, access from home or access from someplace other than home.
  • 74 percent of adults have access at home.
  • 67 percent of U.S. households contain a broadband user who accesses the service at home.
  • 65 percent of adults are broadband adopters…
  • 6 percent of Americans use dial-up Internet connections as their main form of home access.
  • 6 percent are Internet users but do not use it from home; they access the Internet from places such as work, the library or community centers.
  • 22 percent of adults are not Internet users. They are the oldest non-adopting group, with a median age of 60, and include the highest share of Hispanics (at 20 percent). Some 84 percent have high school degrees or less and half live in households with annual incomes of $30,000 per year or less.

Of this last group of so-called non (broadband) adopters, “70 percent have a cell phone.”

Snapshot of online activities segmented by access type (click to enlarge):

Note that “local or community news” is the second most common type of activity online (according to this survey), even more than social networking.

Posted in: Front Porch Forum, Local Online


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