Understanding Broadband Un-adopters

Using data from the nationally-representative Current Population Survey, we find that these “un-adopters” comprised 12% of all households without broadband service as of 2013. From another perspective, approximately 4% of households nationwide with a broadband connection have become “un-adopters” – though, as expected, this rate of un-adoption is much more common among lower-income households (see figure).

Rates of Broadband Un-adoption (among all households with prior connection), by income, 2013.
In comparison with their “never-adopter” counterparts, un-adopters are significantly more likely to cite cost, the potential to use the Internet elsewhere, and the inadequacy of their computer as reasons for their discontinued use. In particular, our models show that households with incomes up to $40,000 are more likely to select “too expensive” as their reason for stopping service – suggesting that policies focusing on un-adopters may need to cater to more than very low-income households.
Our research also found that:
- Un-adopters who are also retirees are more likely to answer “no need” as their reason for discontinuing service, and
- Un-adopters in metropolitan areas are more likely to select “computer inadequate” as their reason.
Our study of un-adopters also uses recent data from the Federal Communications Commission’s Low-Income Broadband Pilot Program during 2012–2013, in which 14 providers implemented various versions of subsidized broadband access. Across these projects, approximately 22% of those signing up were previous un-adopters (comprising from 9% to 50% of the projects’ participants). Descriptive statistics from the roughly 9,000 people who participated in the Pilot Program help shed some additional light on previous un-adopters. Although instances of missing data limited inference in some cases, several meaningful differences between un-adopters and never-adopters were found:
- Across the projects, un-adopters (as opposed to those who never had a prior broadband connection) seemed to have a preference for wired connections, and were more responsive to specific pricing strategies for those wired connections (i.e. their monthly connection costs were lower).
- Un-adopters were significantly less likely to accept an offer to enroll in a digital literacy program upon enrollment; however, they were more likely to already have completed such a program.
- There were no statistical differences between the groups in terms of how many participated for the full 12 months of the project. Importantly, previous un-adopters were less likely to retain the service both one and three months after the subsidized access ended.
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