50 million US homes have only one 25Mbps Internet provider or none at all

10.6 million homes have no wired access to 25Mbps, 4.9 million can't get 3Mbps.

More than 10.6 million US households have no access to wired Internet service with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, and an additional 46.1 million households live in areas with just one provider offering those speeds, a new analysis has found. That adds up to more than 56 million households lacking any high-speed broadband choice over wired connections. Even when counting access to fixed wireless connections, there are still nearly 50 million households with one 25Mbps provider or none at all.

The data comes from a report by researchers who evaluated Federal Communications Commission data in order to shed more light on broadband deployment, or lack thereof. The FCC's own reports on this data show the percentage of developed census blocks that have ISPs offering broadband at various speeds. The researchers attempted to improve upon that analysis by comparing the census block information to household data from the US Census Bureau's 2015 American Community Survey in order to determine how many homes have or don't have high-speed broadband access.

"We believe that looking at the household access counts is a better measure of access because many un/under-served census blocks are in very remote areas with few households," they wrote. (The report was written by Hal Singer of Economists Incorporated and Ed Naef and Alex King of CMA Strategy Consulting.)

Nearly half lack high-speed choice

FCC reports have found that about three-quarters of the country's developed census blocks lack any high-speed broadband choice. The household analysis found a slightly better, but still troubling, situation, with nearly half of the 118 million US households lacking any wired Internet choice at the FCC's broadband standard of 25Mbps. (One caveat: this new analysis examined only download speeds, whereas FCC reports define broadband as services offering both 25Mbps download speeds and at least 3Mbps uploads.)

About 54.5 million households had access to at least two wired providers offering 25Mbps speeds, and 6.9 million had access to three such providers. The data goes up to June 2016.

Even at lower speeds, tens of millions lack any choice. There were 31.1 million households with exactly one wireline provider offering speeds of at least 10Mbps, and another 6.9 million households with zero providers offering such speeds over wired connections. At the paltry level of 3Mbps download speeds, 19.3 million households had access to one wireline ISP and 4.9 million households had no access at all.

At the 100Mbps wired Internet level, 26.4 million households had no access, while another 67.4 million had access to one provider.

The chart on the right in the above graphic shows access to either wireline or fixed wireless broadband, which includes home Internet services delivered from a tower to an antenna instead of a cable. Even in this analysis, more than 40 million households had just one provider offering speeds of at least 25Mbps. More than nine million still had no access.

The analysis excluded satellite services, which are available nearly everywhere in the US but typically suffer from high latency and low data caps. Cellular service is also excluded as the data focuses on home or "fixed" Internet connections.

The report summarizes the findings here:

The competitive landscape for wireline broadband services typically consists of the telco, a cable company, and in rare instances a cable overbuilder. Currently, there are roughly 19 million homes with only one provider of wireline broadband with speeds greater than 3Mbps, and over 46 million homes with only one provider of broadband speeds greater than 25Mbps. 10.6 million homes have no access to 25Mbps service, and in other instances, “Fixed Wireless” service is the only option for households to get the Internet—roughly 1 million homes can only get this speed through a wireless provider as no wireline option is available.
The analysis is still imperfect, because ISPs report deployment to the FCC on the census block level rather than the individual household level. For purposes of the analysis, the authors assumed that an ISP serves all households in a census block if the ISP reported offering service to at least one household in the block.

"The reason this doesn't end up being a huge issue is because blocks are very small," King told Ars. "There are some issues on the margins where one household that is in one block has service but others don't."

There are more than 11 million Census blocks in the US, and about 4.9 million of them lack any residents.

Naef and King consult with telecoms on whether it's worth investing in networks. "We've done this work with the actual providers themselves... for the most part, if they're in the block they're covering the majority of that block," King said.

Still, this means that the data could slightly underestimate the country's broadband availability problems by counting some households as being served when they're not.

The data we've mentioned so far just accounts for whether a household is located in a broadband service area, whether or not the occupants actually subscribe to an Internet service. About 73 percent of US adults are home broadband users, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Economic incentives for network investments

The main purpose of the paper was to analyze the economic incentives for expanding and investing in new facilities, and it discussed the "impact of removing regulatory barriers" on broadband deployment. There's no mention of net neutrality or Title II—instead, the analysts looked at potential changes that could let phone companies retire copper lines more quickly in order to install fiber or speed up access to utility poles via a "One Touch Make Ready" rule.

Favorable rule changes could make it profitable for ISPs to install fiber to another 26.7 million premises, the authors estimated. It's generally more financially challenging to upgrade in sparsely populated communities.

"There are a bunch of rural places that are just really challenging to make the business case work, and there's a lot of places that are on the margin," Naef told Ars. "The reason why we think even relatively modest rule changes can have an impact is because those marginal places can flip from negative value to being positive value."

But even without rule changes, there are "a bunch of places where the business case works fairly well today for investment in next-generation broadband," Naef said. With millions of households having no access to high-speed broadband, that's not much of a surprise.