Connectivity Follow-up

Yesterday was a semi-busy day for me with teaching back to back library instructions sessions for one of our university's English professors.  Sometimes in the midst of instruction, you learning interesting facts yourself either from the session or in preparations for it.  Going in, I was not aware of any topic, but as it turned out, her topic for her students was, roughly, examining the concept of what are private spaces and what are public spaces and how has technology changed our conception of those.  Obviously here with U.S. legislation in the last few weeks those things have been debated with SOPA and PIPA.  The topic was timely nonetheless. 

It was an hour, one-shot class so after we are done speaking we interact with the students more on a one-on-one basis.  As I was working with one particular student, their topic was to some degree looking at the availability of Internet access in the United States.  While the student worked on their own a little bit, I did some of my own searching for her from the classroom podium equipped with a PC.  As I did my best to come up with search terms for Google, I came across a U.S. government site ( I love the availability of the statistics by the way) that had three tables courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau.  The data was collected through a Current Population Survey (CPS) in 2009. 

According to Table 1, 68.7% of those that responded had some type of Internet access.  Of that number, 63.5% of them had broadband access, 4.7% had dial-up, and 0.4% had something other than broadband or dial-up.  Getting down into the ages, the split was fairly even between those aged 25-34 (74.2%), 35-44 (77.8%), 45-54 (75.8%); but the two lowest numbers were those younger than 25 (67.0%) and 55 or older (58.2%).  So, over 2/3s of the United States has some form of Internet access in their homes, and interestingly enough, 76.7% reported that they access the Internet from "some location".  I take this to mean coffee shops, restaurants, offices, but I would be inclined to thing that much could be attributed to libraries either in school, at a university, or in public libraries.  So, while 31.3% don't have Internet access at home, I think it becomes more critical for libraries to be protected so that they can provide the access to the ubiquitous level users need.

As a last point, when the Census Bureau first began asking about Internet access in 1997, only 18.0%, of the 102,158,000 users reported having access at home, so in roughly 12 years, up to 2009, that number more than tripled up to the aforementioned 68.7% of the 119,296,000 had Internet access/use at home.