Americans as a whole are growing less likely than before to have residential broadband, according to new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In plain English, they're abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet -- and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web. The study, conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau, partly upholds what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to get online. Today nearly a third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That's up from 16 percent in 2013. They're often cited as evidence of a digital divide; families with little money to afford a home Internet subscription must resort to free Wi-Fi at libraries and even McDonald's to do homework, look for jobs and find information. But people with higher incomes are ditching their wired Internet access at similar or even faster rates. In 2013, 8 percent of households making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year were mobile-only. Fast-forward a couple of years, and that figure is 18 percent. Seventeen percent of households making between $75,000 and $100,000 are mobile-only now, compared with 8 percent two years ago. And 15âpercent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus 6 percent in 2013.
