For the most part, America's internet usage trends can be summed up in a few phrases. The Internet is now so common as to be a commodity; the rich have better Internet than the poor; more whites have Internet than people of color; and compared to low-income minorities, affluent whites are more likely to have fixed, wired Internet connections to their homes.
But it may be time to put an asterisk on that last point, according to all-new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In fact, Americans as a whole are growing less likely than before to have residential broadband, the figures show. In plain English, they're abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet — and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web.
The study, which was conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau, partly upholds what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to get online. Today nearly a third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That's up from 16 percent of households falling in that category in 2013.
And they're often cited as evidence of a major digital divide; struggling families with little money to afford a home Internet subscription must troublingly resort to free public WiFi at libraries and even McDonald's to do homework, look for jobs and find information.
Even people with higher incomes are ditching their wired Internet access at similar or even faster rates compared to people who don't make as much. In 2013, 8 percent of households making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year were mobile-only. Fast-forward a couple years, and that figure now stands at 18 percent. Seventeen percent of households making between $75,000 and $100,000 are mobile-only now, compared to 8 percent two years ago. And 15 percent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus just 6 percent in 2013.
