States with More Rich People Get Faster Internet

Here's your daily dose of digital divide: according to an analysis by Highspeedinternet.com, "the only economic factors we found that show any significant relationship with internet speed were the ones that indicate wealth on a personal level."

Obviously looking at something from the distance of "state" isn't going to produce the most nuanced results, and you can see that the state's total GDP has a not-insignificant .41 correlation. Still, Ryann Rasmussen, Highspeedinternet.com's community manager, told me that "it isn't a very strong indicator either."

The analysis found "no significant relationship between internet speed and a state's total GDP, its tax rates, or its unemployment rates."

"In this case, anything above a .50 is considered 'significant' based on our sample size," Rasmussen said via email. "GDP includes business, government, and personal elements. Personal income is far more closely correlated that than the others, so it's probable that the personal factors explain both correlations."

The findings mirror that of a deep report from Pew in 2013, which found that "the demographic factors most correlated with home broadband adoption continue to be educational attainment, age, and household income."

So states with richer people, not richer states, have faster internet. No big surprise there, since the telecom lobby has been working to ensure that the onus for paying for faster internet falls on individuals and not on the state.

The other factor that correlated to internet speed was population distribution. Obviously it's easier to build up broadband or fiber infrastructure in a metropolitan area, so again, not a huge surprise.

What's discouraging, the study notes, is when low household income and high rural population are both found. "The divide in economics and slow internet access likely compounds problems that states like Wyoming and Montana have," the study states. "Sixty-six percent of the Montana population lives in rural areas, and they have the second slowest average Internet speeds."

There's a high cost to introducing, let's say, fiber to a rural or low-income community makes it so private concerns are unlikely to do so. Given that internet access is essential to success in the modern economy, and that a whole lot of people are on the wrong side of the digital divide, and it's easy to predict that if internet access is already correlated, even slightly, with personal wealth, it could be an exacerbating factor in inequality.

You'd think that'd be all that it would take for a government to step in and some have: Chattanooga, Tennessee, which has a median household income below that of the national average, has gigabit internet on offer. The areas surrounding Chattanooga—much of it rural, lower-income Tennessee—remain mostly underserved or unserved by high-speed internet.

And given the legal situation and telecom's interest in keeping people paying more for less, that situation doesn't look like it will change any time soon, leaving faster internet—and the benefits that come with it—like getting into better colleges—for the rich, and also leaving both the digital and the wealth divide, ever more firmly in place.