America's worst-connected big cities

As mentioned in a previous post, the first numbers from the U.S. Census American Community Survey for 2013 were released in September and they included -- for the very first time! -- data on household Internet connections.

Eventually we'll have ACS numbers down to the Census tract level, but for now we only have them for the 575 U.S. "places" (i.e. cities) with populations of 65,000 or more.  Among these cities are 176 that have 50,000 or more residential households.

In the last couple of days, I downloaded the 2013 household Internet data for these 176 larger cities from here, and did the math to rank them by two measures of household "non-connectedness":  

• the percentage of each city's households that lacked home Internet access of any kind, including dial-up accounts and mobile device access (like smartphone access)
• the percentage of households that lacked what the FCC calls "fixed broadband subscriptions", i.e. direct Internet access through DSL, cable modem, fiber-to-the-home or satellite accounts (but not counting mobile devices or dial-up).

For each of these two measures (it's up to you to decide which one you like better), here are the 25 cities with the highest (worst) percentages...  the 25 worst-connected cities in America.

(If you want to see the whole dataset from which these charts are taken, email me and I'll send you a copy.)

Update 11/4: Phil Dampier has an extended commentary on this post at Stop the Cap!

And... so does Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica.