How does broadband access and usage vary across different geographic regions, such as urban and rural areas, and what patterns emerge at the state and county levels?
Broadband availability is relatively high across most U.S. counties, but actual broadband usage lags behind significantly in many areas, especially in the South.
The availability map shows that while broadband infrastructure is relatively widespread across the U.S., it is more concentrated in the Northeast, Midwest, and along the West Coast, where many counties approach near-universal coverage. In contrast, Southern states show notably lower levels of broadband availability, indicating lack of broadband infrastructure or restrictive local policies.
The broadband usage map shares a similar geographic pattern to broadband availability, with the highest usage rates occurring in regions such as California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. These regions are typically urban or suburban, where infrastructure is easier to deploy and incomes tend to be higher. The consistency between availability and usage in these regions suggests that when broadband is accessible, people tend to adopt it. In contrast, notable clusters of low usage appear in Southern states such as Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, and West Virginia. These disparities reflect an uneven distribution in broadband usage, as residents in some regions are either less likely or less able to use broadband services on a regular basis.
While we recognize the potential overestimation in broadband availability and underestimation in broadband usage in our dataset as discussed in the data critique, we believe these biases likely account for only a small portion of the observed differences. As we delve deeper into the gap between broadband availability and usage, we will see how these disparities are better explained by systemic issues such as racism, redlining grades, and uneven distribution of public resources.
States like Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico had high broadband availability but low usage, revealing large gaps driven by non-infrastructure barriers.
The two bar charts above underscore that access alone is not enough. While infrastructure might be available in many states, usage sporadically lags behind, pointing to other barriers such as affordability, lack of digital literacy, or limited access to devices. This supports our broader argument that solving the digital divide requires more than just building networks – it also means addressing social and economic inequalities that prevent people from using those networks. States with high availability but low usage may be “digitally invisible” in federal metrics that focus only on infrastructure. By exposing this gap, we can challenge assumptions that broadband access equates to digital equity.
Broadband availability and usage show a weak correlation, highlighting that other socioeconomic barriers influence whether people actually use broadband even when it is available.
Each dot on the scatter plot represents a county, with the x-axis showing broadband availability and the y-axis showing broadband usage. The overall trend in the data suggests a very weak positive correlation between broadband availability and usage — counties with higher broadband availability tend to have somewhat higher broadband usage, but the relationship is neither strong nor consistent. When each state is colored (20 chosen at random because of Tableau limitations), the data points are still extremely spread out, which reinforces this observation that even within individual states, there’s substantial variation in usage that cannot be explained by availability alone. This loose correlation can give us a bit of insight into how to explore the connection between digital divide and wealth inequality, since it indicates that there must be other factors at play affecting a county’s broadband usage. While we can’t say for sure that having more broadband causes people to use it more, we can see that there is a general link. However, there are plenty of counties that have perfect broadband availability, but usage is still low, which could suggest barriers like cost, lack of devices, or lack of digital skills, which are often tied to poverty. Other counties show high availability and high usage, which probably means fewer barriers.
Urban states have higher broadband usage-to-availability ratios than rural states.
The most urban states in the U.S.—New Jersey, California, and Nevada—exhibit significantly higher broadband usage-to-availability ratios than the most rural states—Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia. This contrast suggests that rural communities are less likely to translate available infrastructure into meaningful internet adoption. Even when broadband is technically available, rural residents tend to underutilize it. This finding supports existing scholarship that emphasizes broadband usage is shaped not just by physical access but by broader structural conditions, such as affordability, digital literacy, and trust in technology (Warschauer, 2004; Sanders & Scanlon, 2021). In essence, broadband availability alone is an insufficient indicator of digital inclusion.
This disparity highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of digital equity, particularly in relation to geography. Treating broadband access as a binary—either available or not—obscures the layered realities of rural digital exclusion. These findings raise important questions: What local factors contribute to lower broadband adoption in rural areas despite infrastructure availability? How do geographic isolation, population density, or community-level resources shape the way broadband is used—or not used? And how might lived experiences with technology differ across urban and rural settings in ways that influence engagement? A more comprehensive view of the digital divide must account for these place-based differences, not just coverage statistics.