LETTER: Rural Minnesota shouldn’t be caught on the wrong side of the digital divide

From Jack M. Geller, Ph.D.
Center for Rural Policy and Development
Back in 1999, I was meeting with a group of academic and government leaders when someone mentioned the growing diffusion of high-speed broadband Internet service throughout the Twin Cities metro. Of course my question was, “So what do you think about broadband throughout rural Minnesota?” And surprisingly, the primary response was, “Well, we really hadn’t thought about it.”
Much has changed throughout rural Minnesota since then. In the year 2000, less than half of all rural households had an Internet connection and only 6 percent reported having a broadband connection. Today 60 percent of all rural households are online and approximately 40 percent of all rural households have a broadband Internet connection. Simply put, over the past few years the adoption of broadband services throughout rural Minnesota has been not just growing but accelerating. So what exactly is driving all these families to purchase a more expensive broadband connection?
Well, each year when we conduct what has become our annual Internet surveys, we not only ask rural residents about their technology purchases, we also question them about what they do online. And for several years in the earlier part of this decade, we found, unremarkably, that people who connected to the Internet using a broadband connection did exactly the same things online that people with dial-up connections did. The only difference was that those with a broadband connection were able to do these things much faster and more conveniently.