Broadband Connection Highs and Lows Across Rural America

Story by Tim Murphy and Bill Bishop 

The percentage of U.S. farms with high speed Internet access varies wildly from state to state and county to county, according to the recently released federal Census of Agriculture. Nearly 6 out of 10 farms in Connecticut had a high speed Internet connection in 2007, when the Census was taken. In Mississippi, only 2 out of 10 farms had a quick connection to the World Wide Web.

The Census found that farms in rural and exurban counties were less likely to have broadband connections than farms located in metro counties. Nationally, 31.3 percent of farms in rural counties had broadband connections. In urban counties, nearly 40 percent of farm operators had high speed Internet connections.

Over 2.2 million farms were included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Census, which is conducted every 5 years. In 2002, the Census found that half the farms in the country were connected to the Internet in some way (broadband or dial-up). By 2007, the percentage of farms with some kind of Internet connection inched up to 56.5 percent.

However, only 33 percent of farms in 2007 had broadband connections.

Click on Map to view larger image.

The Census only contacts farm operators, but the results here may be a good surrogate for how far broadband has penetrated across rural America. In a 2007 phone survey, The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 31 percent of rural Americans had broadband connection—a percentage that exactly matches the overall findings of the Census.

The Pew survey was too small to show differences from state to state. The Census, however, gives a good reading on how broadband Internet is being used down to the county level. (See the map above.)

There were large differences in how deeply broadband connections had penetrated into rural communities by region of the country. The West leads in broadband connections and the South lags far behind.

There are patterns in the Census data. The most urban states have the most farms with broadband connection. Also, states with large farms also have a high percentage of operations with high speed connections. Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas are all well above the national average of broadband connection.

The 50 purely rural counties with the highest percentage of farms having broadband connections are a mixture of recreation counties and counties with serious agricultural interests.

Rural communities teeming with big farms—farms with large acreages and incomes—had rates of broadband connection that were above the national average. Where large farms constituted 20 percent or more of the county’s farm operators, more than 75 percent of those counties had rates of broadband connection that were above the U.S. average.

These “big ag” counties accounted for only 38 percent of all rural and suburban counties, but 58 percent of all rural and suburban counties with above average high speed connections. These counties were home to only 33 percent of all rural farms nationally, but 40 percent of farms with broadband connections.

In this sense, states mattered less than the structure of agriculture within individual counties. For example, Mississippi had the lowest state average for broadband usage by farmers. But all the counties in the state’s sprawling Mid South Delta region of large cotton and soybean producers — not to mention catfish farms — were above the national average for broadband connections.

The average rate for broadband connection in the Delta was 36 percent, five points over the U.S. average and 23 percent better than the South as a whole.

The most connected rural counties, however, are the very rich recreation counties of Nantucket in Massachusetts and Pitkin (home of the ski resort Aspen) in Colorado. Hood River, a windsurfing Mecca east of Portland, Oregon, ranks third. The next three are ski counties in Colorado.

Still, three counties in Nebraska — Kearney, Phelps and Clay — rank 6, 7 and 8 on the list of best-wired counties.

The Census asked only two questions pertaining to the Internet: Did the farm operator at any time in 2007 have internet access? And, did the farm operator have a high speed Internet connection? The Census did not ask about price or the kind of connection the operator purchased — DSL, cable, satellite.

The nation has little sense of who has and who lacks broadband connections in rural America. The Senate stimulus bill, in fact, requires the Department of Commerce to prepare “a comprehensive nationwide inventory map of existing broadband service capability and availability in the United States.”

Until that report is completed, the Ag Census may have the most complete survey of rural broadband availability. The Census collected answers from so many rural residents — more than 1.3 million farms ranging from mega-ranches in Texas to hobby farms in Washington — that it gives a good picture of how deeply broadband has penetrated into rural America.

The map at the top of this story shows a clear divide between the eastern and western United States. Farms east of the Mississippi River, especially in the South, use broadband Internet far less than those farms in the Great Plains, the Mountain West and the Pacific coast. Some states are clearly more broadband-savvy than others.

Is that because of the local economy, state policy, national broadband initiatives, or local government? It’s impossible to tell, but the variation in broadband use across rural America is so large that it raises questions about the extent of economic and social inequality among rural communities.

More broadband findings

Rural residents are more likely to say they don’t want an Internet connection. But they are also far less likely to have experienced it.

 Household broadband use in rural and urban areas, by household income in 2007
Click on picture to view larger image 

Percent of farms in rural countries with fast Internet connection
Click on picture to view larger image 

Plenty of rural residents don’t want broadband. But rural dial-up users are far less likely to have broadband available than are people living in the cities or the suburbs.

Rural residents using dial-up services to connect to the Internet are seven times more likely to be without access to broadband than dial-up users in the cities.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project routinely asks those without Internet broadband connections why they don’t have the speedier service. Most say that they aren’t interested in getting on line. Rural adults are more likely to say they are “not interested in getting online” than are adults living in urban areas.

Nationwide, 9 percent of all adults, however, use dial-up services, and when Pew’s John Horrigan examined why these Internet users avoided broadband, he found large differences in the responses of urban, suburban and rural residents.

Of those using dial-up in cities, 36 percent said they wouldn’t switch to broadband because of price, but only 3 percent said they didn’t have fast Internet connection because it wasn’t available.

Among suburban dial-up users, 37 percent said cost kept them from adopting broadband; 11 percent said the service wasn’t available.

In rural communities, however, 30 percent of dial-up users said they wouldn’t use broadband because of price, and 24 percent said broadband wasn’t available where they lived.

Dial-up users in rural areas were more than seven times more likely to say broadband was unavailable than dial-up users in the cities. “Providing incentives to build broadband infrastructure directly addresses the availability problem and could be of particular help to Americans living in rural areas,” Horrigan wrote.

The final stimulus bill contains about $6.8 billion to extend broadband Internet into unserved areas in the U.S. Most of those communities without broadband are in rural America.

A debate has started about whether it’s worthwhile to extend broadband to those who don’t have it already. The most persistent warning about broadband spending is that it is the cyber-equivalent of building a “bridge to nowhere”—that the government will spend billions to extend technology to people who don’t want it or won’t know what to do with it.

What the Pew survey shows is a real technological divide between rural and urban users. Not everyone wants or would use a broadband connection, even if it were delivered for free. For a much larger percentage of rural users, however, broadband isn’t a choice that is available, according to the Pew surveys.

The CEO of the country’s second largest rural telecommunications provider told state utility commissioners in February that broadband service was the “key to shoring up a rapidly evolving rural economy,” according to Andrew Feinberg with Broadbandcensus.com. Maggie Eilderotter with Frontier Communications said that rural businesses “deserve better” than what many telecommunications companies now offer.

“If you choose to live in rural America…you should have the same [access to high speed Internet service] as anyone else,” Wilderotter said.

This story was first published in the Daily Yonder, online at www.dailyyonder.com.

Austin, Texas-based Bill Bishop is co-editor of The Daily Yonder. He is author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of America is Tearing Us Apart (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008).

Based in Palm Beach, Fla., Tim Murphy is a researcher for The Daily Yonder.

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