Consumers Want Broadband Over HDTV

This should give Google's White Space Initiative even more weight.

White Space offers "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans".

From ArsTechnica

Broadband services and speeds are ranked higher than any other "new" service when it comes to their importance to consumers.

New survey results from Pike & Fischer Broadband Advisory Services show that while HDTV and digital phone service were important to some consumers, high-speed data came out ahead of the rest.

-almost 40 percent of Pike & Fischer's survey respondents gave high-speed data the highest rating. Comparatively, only about 25 percent ranked HDTV as high, and digital phone service was at the bottom of the list, with under 10 percent ranking it a five.

A recent report by Akamai pointed out that countries like South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong all have relatively high percentages of broadband connections over 5Mbps (64, 48, and 35 percent, respectively), while only 20 percent of US connections fall into that category.

When it comes to just "fast" connectivity (over 2Mbps), the US ranked at number 24 in the list—South Korea once again came out on top, followed by Belgium and Switzerland.

The average download speed in the US was a mere 1.9Mbps.

Pike & Fischer points out the fairly obvious (to us geeks, anyway): without high broadband speeds, millions of other features being offered to us by cable companies and telcos will have a harder time getting off the ground.