Broadband Adoption and Content Consumption

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Operations, Information and Decisions Papers
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
digital divide
broadband adoption
telecommunications policy
media
internet
Communications Law
Digital Communications and Networking
Interdisciplinary Arts and Media
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Hitt, Lorin M
Tambe, Prasanna B
Contributor
Abstract

We explore how broadband access drives changes in the quantity and diversity of consumption of online content by using panel data that describes household Internet usage before and after broadband adoption. Our data suggests that on average, broadband adoption increases usage by over 1300 min per month. We also find that information consumption becomes more evenly distributed within the population, driven in part by post-adoption usage gains of almost 1800 min per month among individuals who were in the lowest usage quintile before adopting broadband. After adopting broadband, this pre-adoption lowest-usage quintile consumes content in greater quantities than users in neighboring quintiles, passing both the second and third quintiles in terms of absolute usage. This suggests that these users may have had strong preferences for high-bandwidth content that was too costly to consume in a narrowband environment. We also show that broadband adoption increases the variety of content that users consume although many of these gains appear to be associated with an increase in the variety of sites visited within previously visited content categories rather than an expansion in the types of content consumed.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
2007-10-01
Journal title
Information Economics and Policy
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection