Imagine that northeast Indiana suddenly lost all other forms of communication – landline telephones, cell phones, mail service, television, radio, newspapers – and all that was left was the Internet.
How many people would be connected? How many would be left in the dark?
In other words, how many people in northeast Indiana are connected to the Internet?
It’s a simple question, but one with no clear answer.
The 2008 presidential election showed the emerging importance of the Internet in political campaigns, but it’s established itself as a valuable, even essential, part of life in other areas.
Need to apply for welfare? In Indiana, at least, that process is shifting to call centers and online. Need a job? In addition to combing newspaper classified ads, job-seekers can post résumés online or comb through want ads.
Hospitals are using high-speed Internet technology to make health care more accessible. High-speed Internet connections are also important to companies large and small and to students, whether it’s a high school student doing research or a distance learner earning a degree.
The 2007 census estimated that 42.3 percent of Hoosier households are connected to broadband, or high-speed, Internet.
But those figures don’t speak to the issue of where broadband is available, said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a national non-partisan media reform organization based in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts.
What’s more, the figures don’t tell who’s using other types of connections such as dial-up. Reliable public information on overall Internet usage is difficult, if not impossible, to get on a local level, Turner said.
Some data are available – for a price – from marketing companies such as Nielsen Claritas that do their own research, often based on surveys.
In Allen County, more than 120,000 consumers have access to Verizon’s fiber-optic-based FiOS. The company said it has spent more than $150 million in the county since 2005 deploying the technology.
Comcast wouldn’t release local customer numbers, saying only that it has 14.7 million high-speed Internet customers nationally and that it offers Comcast high-speed Internet to its entire Fort Wayne customer area.
But those numbers speak only of availability. Total local subscribers? No way, say both Verizon and Comcast.
“That’s information our competitors would love to know as well,” said Lee Gierczynski, Verizon media relations manager.
Broadband availability rose to the forefront in the presidential election year of 2008.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46 percent of Americans used the Internet, e-mail or text messaging to get news about political campaigns, share opinions and get others involved.
Since his election, President-elect Barack Obama has delivered a weekly address not only on radio but through Internet videos, best viewed with a high-speed connection.
The cause itself is one Obama has championed, calling the current state of U.S. broadband access “unacceptable” in a speech last month.
But beyond broadband, how many people in northeast Indiana subscribe to any type of Web service at home?
John Dunbar was stumped.
“You ask a great question,” he said after a pause.
Dunbar is a senior fellow at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan and non-advocacy Washington non-profit that produces original investigative journalism on issues of public concern.
Dunbar’s predecessor tried to get data, broken down by ZIP code, about broadband deployment in the U.S., intending to map where the service was available.
The FCC denied the request, as did a U.S. District Court, saying local-level data would cause “competitive harm” to existing providers.
The Federal Communications Commission has long kept its own data, but that information, experts said, was skewed by a vague definition of broadband.
But there appears to be some hope of answers further down the Information Superhighway – as early as this spring.
The FCC’s data were so questionable that it prompted Congress in late 2007 to pass the Broadband Data Improvement Act, which asks the FCC to revise its definition of broadband, identify tiers of high-speed service and revise provider reporting requirements that will enable the FCC to identify “actual numbers of broadband connections by customer type and geographic area.”
Dunbar is familiar with the FCC data. Before taking his current position last year, he covered information technology and economics for the Washington bureau of The Associated Press.
“The federal government has done a pretty poor job of keeping track,” he said.
Even so, he’s impressed with how far the FCC has come in the last couple of years, and the new data and ways of tracking will help the nation decide where to target for broadband and when.
“They’ve come a long way,” he said.
Supporters of nationwide broadband argue there’s more to be done.
Last month, representatives of technology and telecommunications companies, labor unions and public-interest groups announced a coalition to work on a broadband deployment plan.
The plan could include tax breaks, low-interest loans, subsidies and public-private partnerships.
One of those public-interest groups, Free Press, points to the “digital divide” as the main reason broadband should be a priority even in a recession.
Using 2007 census figures, the organization found that barely a third of homes earning less than $50,000 a year have a high-speed Internet connection, while more than three-fourths of households earning more than that are connected.
And the divide has racial implications: Only 40 percent of racial and ethnic minority households have access to broadband, while 55 percent of non-Hispanic white households do, Free Press said.
It’s easy for a nation so caught up in the Internet to forget that there are people who aren’t hooked up at home.
Clay Blackburn is one. Blackburn, 28, Web-surfed Thursday at the Allen County Public Library. He uses the library’s Internet connection frequently, often for job-searching, he said.
Why? He looked into the costs of getting a home connection with speed comparable to the library’s and it was too expensive, he said.
Free Press found that Americans have the eighth-highest cost for broadband service among leading developed nations. People in Japan pay about half what Americans pay for a connection 20 times faster than commonly available U.S. service.
For 20-year-old Shavonia Greene, using the library’s computers is about speed. Her home connection is painfully slow, she said.
“Speed Matters” is the motto adopted by Communications Workers of America, which also champions a national broadband deployment plan.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know the full extent of our problem because our data is so poor,” the union’s president, Larry Cohen, testified to Congress in mid-2007.
“We don’t know where high-speed networks are deployed, how many households and small businesses connect to the Internet, at what speed, and how much they pay. Without this information, we can’t craft good policy solutions.”
aturner@jg.net