How much does broadband infrastructure matter? Decomposing the metro–non-metro adoption gap with the help of the National Broadband Map

•The metro–non-metro gap in residential broadband adoption was 12–13 percentage points in both 2003 and 2011.•We mesh infrastructure data from the National Broadband Map with adoption data from the Current Population Survey in 2011.•Decomposition results show that metro — non-metro differences in infrastructure comprised 38% of the 2011 adoption gap.•Meanwhile, metro — non-metro differences in general characteristics (such as education and income) comprised 52%.•We suggest that future policies for increasing rural adoption rates should include both demand and supply components.

Although overall residential broadband adoption rates have increased dramatically over the past decade, the metropolitan–non-metropolitan gap has been consistent at 12–13 percentage points. Policy prescriptions to address this problem have focused on either increasing broadband supply (typically via funding for infrastructure) or demand (such as educational efforts about why broadband is useful) in rural areas. However, the appropriate programmatic mix remains an open question, since little empirical analysis has actually assessed the degree to which a lack of infrastructure is responsible for this ‘digital divide.’ In this article, information on broadband adoption from 2011 Current Population Survey data are meshed with detailed broadband infrastructure data from the newly available National Broadband Map. A non-linear decomposition technique is used to demonstrate that existing metro–non-metro differences in infrastructure availability comprised approximately 38% of the 2011 broadband adoption gap. This same technique also shows that 52% of the gap is due to differences in characteristics such as education and income, suggesting that future policies and programs addressing this issue should include a heavily-weighted demand component.