The folks at Purdue University always do a great job with broadband research and surveys. They recently asked folks who don’t have a home connection why they don’t. There may be some regional differences but I feel like it’s helpful to see the results.

Today, we take a close look at the reasons why 12.4% of Indiana survey respondents did not pay for home internet for any of the previous 12 months. Reasons included in the survey were grouped into affordability, availability, alternatives/skills, and privacy/relevance. Figure 1 breaks down each group and the percentage of survey respondents citing a “big” reason (options included not a reason, small reason, medium reason, and big reason) for not paying for home internet at all over the previous 12 months.

Interesting also to look at how the covered populations (to borrow from at NTIA term) differed in their answers…

Among rural survey respondents, 42.2% said home internet costs too much followed by 38.9% saying they could not get it installed. This confirms lack of broadband access in rural areas is a barrier since less than 10% of urban survey respondents (not shown) cited this reason.