The rural broadband gap
As federal agencies decide how to spend $7 billion dollars allocated for high speed Internet deployment from the recently-passed stimulus package, a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture attempts to quantify the extent of the digital divide between urban and rural America. The USDA says 72.6 percent of urban dwellers use the Internet somewhere, compared to 63.3 percent of rural residents. Internet penetration is lowest in the rural south.
The city-country gap is much bigger when it comes to broadband deployment.
Advocacy group Free Press, which campaigns for universal broadband, has just released a report called Five Days On the Digital Dirt Road which attempts to put a human face on the digital divide.
