With the all of the hustle and bustle of a new Administration, comes talk of what the new President will do during his term. One of the issues that President Barack Obama sees as one of his goals is expanding true broadband access to every community in America by implementing an economic stimulus package. Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report analyzing what the likelihood is of completing this goal.
The report consisted of two surveys asking dial-up and non-internet users why they have upgraded to a broadband connection or internet access at home, respectively. The results of the survey revealed that the two challenges that the economic stimulus package would face are availability and price. The survey found that 35% of dial-up users find broadband to be too expensive. Meanwhile, 24% of dial-up users and 13% of non-internet users say they can’t get broadband because the infrastructure doesn’t reach their home. The report mentions that a possible solution to this problem would be changing the Lifeline and Link-up programs that provide subsidies to telephone companies so that they can be subsidized for home broadband access as well.
The most interesting part of the report was that 51% of respondents, both dial-up and non-internet users said that they don’t have broadband at home because they are not interested in getting online. It seems that with this group of people, networked digital sources do not play enough of a role in their lives. Given that this group either has no or slow Internet access, it makes sense that they do not interact with it very much. For them, the Internet is irrelevant to their lives. This is where local search can play a big part. By continuing to improve and offer more local search resources along side the proposed broadband expansion efforts, the Internet experience would increasingly improve for not just dial-up/non-internet users, but everyone else as well. Whether online or offline, when consumers are looking for business information they turn to local search sources. It would be interesting to find out how many people in this group use the Yellow Pages. If a lot of people from this group use the Yellow Pages, they probably would find the Internet to be more relevant to them if know that they can do the same thing Online.
Increased broadband access would also not only affect home internet service, but Mobile as well. Since Mobile devices that have Internet access use broadband, these devices would be affected as well. As I mentioned in a past blog post, “Increased iPhone Demand Among Lower-Income Demographic”, as devices like the iPhone drop in price, more and more consumers will purchase these thus increasing the importance of this media source. And because these mobile handsets are portable, Local Search can play a part in this as well giving consumers access to business information at anyplace, at anytime. By improving Local Search the Internet, as well as Mobile, would become decidedly more important to this group of people. By expanding broadband access, small and large businesses alike will have a great opportunity to market their products and services to more people through Local Search.
What’s your Perspective?