I have so much Minnesota-specific broadband news happening lately that I’ve been trying to focus BUT I found the following results of a broadband adoption survey almost shocking. I’ll just quote directly from the Washington Post…

For the most part, America’s Internet-usage trends can be summed up in a few phrases. The Internet is now so common as to be a commodity; the rich have better Internet than the poor; more whites have Internet than do people of color; and, compared with low-income minorities, affluent whites are more likely to have fixed, wired Internet connections to their homes.

But it may be time to put an asterisk on that last point, according to new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In fact, Americans as a whole are becoming less likely to have residential broadband, the figures show: They’re abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet — and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web.

The study, which was conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau, partly reaffirms what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to go online. Today, nearly one-third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That’s up from 16 percent of households falling in that category in 2013.

To be fair a mobile-only choice for all income brackets still lags behind wired or wired/wireless combination but the mobile-only percentage is growing.