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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, July 09, 2004

Massachusetts ranks 2d in broadband use

Boston Globe: "Massachusetts leads the continental United States in high-speed Internet use, with nearly a third of its households connected to broadband, according to a survey released yesterday. The 32.2 percent of Bay State households and small home-based office workers using broadband lags only Hawaii, at 35 percent, according to Leichtman Research Group Inc., a Durham, N.H., market-analysis firm. The group tracks the markets for broadband -- chiefly cable modems and telephone digital subscriber lines -- and the cable and satellite pay-TV markets. Four of the top five states for broadband usage are in New England. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island each have more than 25 percent of their households on broadband, according to a Leichtman Group analysis of January data from the Federal Communications Commission. Next on the list are New Jersey, New York, and California."

I was among the first in the country to get cable modem access several years ago (I was literally the 8:00 am appointment on that first Monday, and several people were at my house most of the day setting it up), because I lived in Phoenix, which is geographically friendly for rolling out new telecommunications services. So I had broadband years before most people, including those here in Boston. But when I moved back to the Boston area in 1999, I was astonished at how many different broadband choices there were here: Two cable companies, one DSL, and one satellite-based. Amazing, considering I live in a small Boston suburb. Today, virtually everyone I know has broadband, and thanks to faster throughputs from the cable companies, the volume of usage here hasn't really slowed things down at all, as the DSL backers claimed would happen. We live in Good Times.

[ Posted at 9:13 AM | Permalink ]