Almost half of rural households lack broadband, but many of them say they don't need it

New data released by the U.S. Commerce Department shows only 54 percent of rural Americans subscribed to home broadband Internet in October, compared to 66 percent of urban households. The information comes as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department, and the Rural Utilities Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which are in the middle of handing out $7.2 billion in stimulus funding for broadband, Joelle Tessler of The Associated Press reports.

"We're at a point where high-speed access to the Internet is critical to the ability of people to be successful in today's economy and society at large," Larry Strickling, head of the NTIA, told Tessler. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said Tuesday he "wants 100 million U.S. households to have access to ultra high-speed Internet connections, with speeds of 100 megabits per second, by 2020. That would be several times faster than the download speeds many U.S. homes with broadband get now — 3 megabits to 20 megabits per second," Tessler reports.

The data from a Census Bureau October survey of 54,000 households also revealed that among households without broadband access, 38 percent said they don't need it or are not interested, and 26 percent said it is too expensive. "Only 3.6 percent said they do not subscribe because it is not available where they live," Tessler reports. Twenty-nine percent of Americans with a household income less than 15,000 had a broadband subscription in October. (Read more)

The survey data also includes state-rankings of total Internet access, rural Internet access, total broadband access, rural broadband access and several other factors.