Who's still offline and why? The real reasons | Internet & Media - CNET News

Who's still offline and why? The real reasons | Internet & Media - CNET News: "The US still has a "digital divide," but it's not the one most people would imagine. According to the survey, the most significant factor is age: Nearly half of non-users are age 65 or older. Education is the second-most important factor -- more than 40 percent do not hold a high school diploma. Other factors, including sex, race, income level, and geographic location, are less significant, and continue to decrease."

"the most frequently reported reason given by Americans who do not to use the Internet is that it isn't relevant to them. Usability was the second-most cited reason. Together the two accounted for 66 percent of those who are not online. Price and availability were the least-important reasons."

"Although 4G and other networking technologies can and do deliver speeds that exceed the FCC's broadband threshold, the agency excluded mobile entirely from its statistics on access, citing a lack of "reliable" data on precisely how many of the 19 million could or even do get service from mobile broadband providers.
Rather than estimate, the FCC simply counted the entire wireless industry as zero."

"Including data on mobile broadband access provided in the FCC's report but left out of its calculations, the number of Americans without any home broadband provider falls as low as 5.5 million. That's less than 2 percent of the population.
To put that number in perspective, consider that landline telephone service never achieved more than 95 percent (PDF) adoption in American homes. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau, more than 3.5 million Americans still lacked complete indoor plumbing as recently as 2011. Yet universal telephone service has been the policy of the US since the formation of the FCC in 1934. And public efforts to improve household sanitation predate the founding of the Republic. "