“Dividing Lines”, the short film featuring AT&T’s digital redlining of Cleveland that premiered last April at Net Inclusion, is now available to view on line.
Produced by Maria Smith of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Karen Heredia from the New Media Advocacy Project, “Dividing Lines” focuses on Internet access obstacles faced by low income families and neighborhoods in San Francisco and Cleveland. Read more
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has just released Worst Connected Cities 2017. It’s based on the same American Community Survey data as CYC used in this post, but includes many smaller cities (the cutoff point is 50,000 households, not the 100,000 we used) and looks at a different metric: The percentage of households who told the Census they have no home Internet access of any kind. That means no smartphones, no satellite dishes, no dial-up connections and no “Internet access without a subscription”. No connections at all.
So where does Cleveland rank among the 191 cities included in this comparison? Our city is fifth worst-connected among all these cities, with almost 27% of our households still lacking home Internet access of any kind in 2017. Read more
The U.S. Census released its 2017 American Community Survey yesterday. Here are some of the things the new ACS reveals about the state of home Internet access for Cleveland residents in 2017:
Only 55% of Cleveland households had Internet connections via wireline broadband — i.e. cable modem, home fiber, or some form of DSL. In contrast, about 74% of Cuyahoga County residents outside Cleveland had wireline broadband connections.
Even when mobile and satellite accounts are included, just 70% of all Cleveland households had any kind of home broadband service last year. Three of every ten Cleveland homes remained disconnected.
Cleveland’s rates of wireline broadband connection and total home broadband connection made us 2017’s fourth worst-connected U.S. city of 100,000 or more households…. behind only Detroit and Miami, and essentially still tied for third place with Greensboro (for wireline connections) and Memphis (for all broadband connections).
