Earlier this month, the NTIA released a report that dove into the difference between broadband availability in rural and urban areas. More specifically it looked into the differences between rural areas and correlation with broadband access.

The report starts by lining out the documented divide between urban and rural. I won’t belabor that here, since I’ve written on it so often in the past. I will include an interesting figure…

The next step is taking a closer look at rural areas – because all rural areas are not alike. They start by looking at population and they have create 5 categories: Central Cities (2,754 Residents per Square Mile (RPSM)), Suburbs (1,970 RPSM),13 Small Towns (1,447 RPSM), Exurbs (37 RPSM), and Very Rural (11 RPSM). They also look at whether a community is located in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) or not.

The report then looks at what kind of access is available for each population. I’ll just include the figure for the wireline download speeds – while chart for each broadband modality is different the overall story is the same – greater population density, great the odds of broadband access.

It’s an interesting report – it would be fun to take it a step further and look at some qualitative differences – maybe based on demographics (look at age, education and income levels) or economic development characteristics (local industries and/or number of businesses) and assess broadband availability.