Dear Commons Community,

In July, the F.C.C. released its latest broadband access report.  Essentially it indicates that while a substantial majority of Americans have access to broadband connections capable of “originating and receiving high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications,” roughly 80 million American adults do not subscribe to broadband at home, and approximately 14 to 24 million adults do not have access to broadband services in their communities.   The total population of the United States is approximately 310 million people of which 225 million are adults.  The F.C.C. data suggests that fully one-third of adults do not use broadband services in their home.  For those of us who use online technology in our teaching, we should keep this mind as we develop media materials that require the high speed that broadband provides to deliver content.  This does not mean that we should not use these media but that we should also consider additional (text, still image) materials as secondary sources of content.

The full F.C.C. report is available at:

http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db0720/FCC-10-129A1.pdf

Tony