However, in a report released Sunday, the Pew Internet Project said that the broadband gap - while still significant - is narrowing between rural dwellers and those who live in urban and suburban areas.

In 2003, only 9 percent of rural residents had home broadband service. Their city counterparts were more than twice as likely to have service - 21 percent for urban dwellers and 23 percent for suburban dwellers.

By the end of 2005, the percentage of rural residents with broadband had more than doubled, to 24 percent. Urban and suburban penetration had gone up somewhat less, to 38 percent and 40 percent respectively, an increase of two thirds or less.

"Rural broadband users are no different than home high-speed users elsewhere; they go online more often and do more online activities than dial-up users," said the report's principal author, John B. Horrigan.

"But with a lower proportion of broadband users in rural America than elsewhere, the result is that rural Americans, in aggregate, have a more distant relationship with the Internet than urban and suburban Americans," said Horrigan, Pew Internet Project associate director.

Rural homes often are too far from telephone company offices to get DSL service, and usually aren't served by cable companies. That leaves them with few options for high-speed service.

The Pew project found that about 62 percent of rural adults had Internet access by the end of 2005, compared with 70 percent in urban and suburban areas. That 8 percent gap is about half what it was in 2003, Pew said.

But the higher percentage with dial-up service - 29 percent for rural Americans as opposed to 21 percent for others - means that a rural resident is less likely to use the Internet as intensely as his city counterparts.

 

Source: The Dallas Morning News published in the Omaha World Herald on Feb. 27, 2006