More Smartphones May Be Leading to Less Broadband

The Pew Research Center's Mobile Technology and Home Broadband 2019 survey is yielding results that might make broadband providers nervous (and accounts for why ISPs such as Spectrum are branching into the mobile carrier business). It turns out that as smartphone use grows—35 percent of Americans had them in 2011, but today, that number's up to 81 percent—more and more people are using smartphones to go online.

The share of people doing that has doubled to 37 percent since 2013. The percentage is even higher for younger users, with 18- to 29-year-olds saying it's true for 58 percent of them (up from 41 percent in 2013). But the growth is similar in all age categories.

That's not to say people don't get broadband when they have phones—the majority still do. But 27 percent of those polled (from January 8 to February 7, 2019) don't have broadband at all. The reasons why some go without are spelled out in the chart above, quantified for us by our partners at Statista: Broadband and computers are considered too expensive. Smartphones do everything (the percentage of people who believe that has also grown). They can use other internet options elsewhere. Sometimes it's simply that the broadband service isn't available, or it sucks.

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