Under an Obama administration, some form of broadband stimulus package is coming—and $6 billion is already being kicked around as a starting point. But if you build it, will they come? Pew's Internet & American Life Project reminds us that a hardcore contingent of holdouts won't, no matter how cheap or how fast the connection is.

One important component of any broadband stimulus would be availability, with many pundits hoping for a scheme similar to the universal service scheme that wired even rural America for phone service decades ago. In summing up its recent research on broadband, Pew's Associate Director for Research, John Horrigan, notes that this remains a real concern when it comes to broadband; one quarter of rural dial-up users, for instance, say that they can't upgrade to broadband because options aren't available.

But when we look at the overall reasons why Americans don't have broadband, availability isn't the biggest barrier. Neither is price. Those two, combined, only account for one-third of Americans without broadband. Two-thirds simply don't want it.

What's the point?



The bigger issue is a lack of perceived value. 19 percent of dial-up users, for example, say that "nothing" would get them to upgrade, not even lower prices. Of the 25 percent of Americans that don't regularly use the Internet at all (Hi, Mom!), a third said that they were "not interested in going online," almost ten percent thought it was too "difficult," and seven percent simply don't "have time."

Older and poorer Americans tend to be the ones who see less need for broadband, and it's clear that demand for it could be boosted through national e-health and e-government programs. But Pew's main point is that working on price and access alone will only bring broadband to a limited subset of Americans who don't already have it—in the short term, at least.

Those who have broadband tend to want more of it. US speeds lag behind those of some other countries (I spoke with a Swede this morning who described the 10Mbps symmetric connection he had to his apartment... back in 1998), and Americans have a taste for high-speed networks. Pew says that "one-third of existing broadband subscribers are low-hanging fruit to adopt faster broadband soon after it is available," and many others would upgrade their speed tiers in time.

This fits with the other major element of most broadband plans proposed so far: massive upgrades in existing capacity, usually envisaged as fiber to the home. Certainly, a $6 billion stimulus will do little or nothing at this level (Verizon will spend around $20 billion just on its own FiOS system), but the Obama folks have already made it clear that a separate broadband package is being worked out.