American Consumers Benefit from Broadband Expansion
American consumer’s received $30 billion of net benefits from use of fixed line broadband at home, up from the roughly $20 billion in consumer benefits from home broadband use in 2005.
The Substantial Benefits of Broadband Connectivity for U.S.Households, funded in part from Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), revealed that broadband Internet access is now seen as a necessity.
http://internetinnovation.org/files/special-report/CONSUMER_BENEFITS_OF_BROADBAND.pdf
In 1984 only 8% of U.S. households had a computer compared with more than half of all U.S. households by 2000. Less than ten percent of U.S. households had Broadband connectivity in 2001. By 2008, that number had increased to 57% of U.S. households.
Higher speed equals greater consumer benefits, perhaps an additional $6 billion per year. According to this research study, ‘the total economic benefits of broadband are significantly larger than our estimates of the consumer benefits from home broadband.’ The benefit estimates are based exclusively on fixed line Internet service. Benefits to households from wireless broadband services are additional to this research.
In the future, broadband is expected to have a prominent impact on some significant tools, like Smart Power Grids, with two way smart meters like those we are seeing in Germany. Work place flexibility and increased telecommunication between employee and place of business, Health-care with ease of access to medical information and Web 2.0 tools for civic elections.
Since the late 1990′s, vendors have been increasing deployment of fixed broadband lines. In early 2001 residential lines accounted for 96% of total broadband lines, or 10.9 million out of 11.3 million lines with the remaining 400,000 belonging to business lines.
From 2007 to 2008, broadband lines increased from 68.6 million to 77.4 million giving the U.S. the title of most-wired country in terms of broadband subscriber’s… although the U.S. ranks 15th in percentage terms based on the latest OECD broadband penetration rankings.
