Broadband Attitudes Survey: 90% Say It’s Essential or Important

With a newly appointed FCC chairman and an administration that is pro-business and anti-regulatory, broadband infrastructure has become a high-profile issue.

According to a recent broadband attitude survey from the Pew Research Center, different levels of support for broadband are being based on political affiliation.

Broadband policy debates are occurring at a time when roughly nine-in-ten Americans describe high-speed internet service as either essential (49%) or important but not essential (41%). Only about one-in-ten Americans say that high-speed internet access is either not too important (6%) or not important at all (3%).

The political division is most evident in the opinions regarding government subsidization of home broadband access for low-income Americans. Six in ten respondents identifying themselves as Democrats and independents who lean Democratic believe that the government should subsidize home broadband service. The number of Republicans and independents that lean Republican falls to just 14% in support of government subsidization.

And yet, Republicans and Democrats both tend to agree that broadband is important, but Democrats are more likely to say it is essential: 58% of Democrats describe broadband as essential, compared with 38% of Republicans.