Who else wants national broadband?

Federal Communications Commission needs to spur wider broadband adoption but users must want it

Let's say that the Federal Communications Commission's $15.5 billion broadband deployment plan helps produce the fastest nationwide broadband network in the world -- is there any guarantee that more people will use it?

Here's the problem: surveys conducted by both the Federal Communications Commission and the Pew Research Center have found that roughly one-fifth of people who don't use broadband in the United States say they don't feel comfortable accessing the Web, while another fifth of non-users say they don't see the need for broadband connectivity. In other words, you can build all the 100Mbps Web connections you want but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will lead to universal adoption.

The FCC's National Broadband Plan: 4 Big Hopes

To its credit the FCC recognizes this potential pitfall, which is why it has included a series of recommendations in its national broadband plan aimed at spurring wider broadband adoption. Among other things, the FCC advises launching a government-sponsored National Digital Literacy Corps that will teach communities how to properly use broadband technology in libraries, museums and other community centers; exploring the use of mobile technology as a gateway to more robust broadband use; and creating an online digital literacy portal to "create high-quality online lessons that users can access and use at their own pace."

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Let's say that the Federal Communications Commission's $15.5 billion broadband deployment plan helps produce the fastest nationwide broadband network in the world -- is there any guarantee that more people will use it?

Here's the problem: surveys conducted by both the Federal Communications Commission and the Pew Research Center have found that roughly one-fifth of people who don't use broadband in the United States say they don't feel comfortable accessing the Web, while another fifth of non-users say they don't see the need for broadband connectivity. In other words, you can build all the 100Mbps Web connections you want but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will lead to universal adoption.

The FCC's National Broadband Plan: 4 Big Hopes

To its credit the FCC recognizes this potential pitfall, which is why it has included a series of recommendations in its national broadband plan aimed at spurring wider broadband adoption. Among other things, the FCC advises launching a government-sponsored National Digital Literacy Corps that will teach communities how to properly use broadband technology in libraries, museums and other community centers; exploring the use of mobile technology as a gateway to more robust broadband use; and creating an online digital literacy portal to "create high-quality online lessons that users can access and use at their own pace."

There is no one right way to promote broadband adoption, of course, which is why the FCC is recommending several options simply to get a better idea of what works. For example, there are different challenges in promoting broadband in urban areas where people have access to broadband but not a perceived need for it and in rural areas where users might have neither the access nor the perceived need, according to John Horrigan, the consumer research director at the FCC.

"Rural Americans are more likely to have infrastructure availability problems," says Horrigan, who notes that only 50% of Americans in rural areas currently use broadband in their homes versus 65% of Americans in the country as a whole. "But if we did build out into rural areas there would be some rural Americans who would sign up for get broadband right away since they might already have experience with broadband at work but not at home."

But this doesn't mean that there aren't big-picture outlines that can be applied in both rural and urban settings. In fact, Horrigan says that the FCC recommends employing a comprehensive broadband promotion that will tackle as many barriers to adoption as possible. This means helping non-adopters get access to computers, educating them on how to best navigate the Web and helping them understand which Internet applications might be most useful to their daily lives. So while there may be different issues in encouraging broadband deployment in different communities, the overall tactics for showing people the virtues of broadband use tend to be similar.

Keep it simple, smarty

When it comes to broadband education, one organization that has been working on such a comprehensive solution to broadband adoption has been OneCommunity, a nonprofit dedicated to providing public and nonprofit institutions in Northern Ohio with high-speed fiber connections. Earlier this year the group received $18.7 million in broadband stimulus funds to promote broadband adoption and training in Ohio, Michigan, Mississippi, Florida and Kentucky. OneCommunity CEO Scot Rourke says that educating users about broadband becomes much easier once you take away all the tech jargon that can be intimidating to first-time users. Rather, he says that the focus should be on giving people concrete, easy-to-understand uses for the technology that they will want to learn about.