Infrastructure and the Rural—urban Divide in High-speed Residential Internet Access

Abstract

As residential Internet access in the United States shifts toward high-speed connections, a gap has emerged in rural high-speed access relative to urban high-speed access. Potential causes of this high-speed ``digital divide'' include rural—urban differences in people, place, and infrastructure. In this article, Current Population Survey data from 2000, 2001, and 2003 are combined with novel infrastructure data to determine the relative roles of these factors in the rural—urban divide. Bootstrapped decompositions of logit model results demonstrate that rural—urban differences in income and in network externalities, but not in infrastructure, are the dominant causes of the high-speed gap.