This might not come as a big shock to readers but a recent SBA (Small Business Administration) report indicates that broadband is more expensive in rural areas…

The study, entitled The Impact of Broadband Speed and Price on Small Business, found that when prices are held constant, rural small businesses get less service compared with metro small businesses. When services are held constant, rural small businesses pay higher prices than metro small businesses.

So while it may not be a big shock – the first step to remedying the situation is recognizing that there’s a problem and there were some interesting details…

• The small business broadband adoption rate has increased to 90% and that number rises to 95% if you remove the businesses that don’t have computers. (Although I think we might want to know more about those businesses without computers!)
• Almost one-third of businesses surveyed indicated a need for broadband speeds that require greater capacity networks than currently exist in many locations in the United States.
• Almost half (48%) of rural respondents and more than one-third (37%) of metro respondents report that they are not satisfied with their Internet speed.
• Only 1.8% of respondents indicate that no broadband option is available to them—but if satellite is excluded as a broadband option (as has been the assumption under the broadband stimulus programs), the percentage of small businesses reporting having no broadband option jumps to 7.7% for rural respondents and 3.5% for metro-area respondents.
• Overall, respondents pay an average of $110 per month for Internet service, though most pay between $50 and $99 per month.

There’s a big discussion of policy implications, which I think I can nearly sum up as saying that the National Broadband Plan is on track. There was one interesting observation pulled out from a noted study that looks at broadband beyond the US…

“Next Generation Connectivity: A Review of Broadband Internet Transitions and Policy from Around the World” (also called “the Berkman Report”), indicated that:

Our most surprising and significant finding is that “open access” policies—unbundling, bitstream access, collocation requirements, wholesaling, and/or functional separation—are almost universally understood as having played a core role in the first generation transition to broadband in most of the high performing countries; that they now play a core role in planning for the next generation transition; and that the positive impact of such policies is strongly supported by the evidence of the first generation broadband transition.

The report also includes a Minnesota case study. It compares connectivity in Minneapolis with connectivity in Waseca – showing that you can get faster speeds in Minneapolis and you’ll often pay about half the price in Minneapolis as you would in Waseca for comparable service. I’ve included two tables from the report.

Finally – there’s a great table on pages 17-18 of the report that track “Typical Applications and Their Performance for Various Download/Upload Broadband Speeds”. It’s one of the most detailed of such lists I’ve seen. A nice to answer to – what can I do on FTTH that I can’t do on DSL?