Summary of Survey Responses

Transcription

1 Napa County Internet Survey Results Report Overview The Napa County Internet Survey was conducted in order to better understand what internet services area residences are using. A short survey was developed to get an idea of which internet service providers (ISP s) people were subscribed in addition to the level of service, price they pay and their home address. Surveys were conducted via a google form and a paper mailer. See Appendix A for a copy of the survey instrument in paper format. After completing the survey, respondents were instructed to download the CalSPEED test software available at and run speed tests periodically at their home throughout the testing period. By doing this we hoped to better understand how well served Napa County is compared to state standards for broadband throughput. Summary of Survey Responses Survey responses were reviewed for out-of-county and duplicate responses. After cleanup of the final results we tallied 433 responses. Respondents were subscribed to 13 different broadband providers utilizing Cable, DSL, Fixed Wireless, Satellite and Dial-Up technologies. Figure 1 illustrates the number of people subscribed to different providers throughout the county. Responses where the home ISP was unknown or using a mobile connection were excluded. Figure 1.

2 Total market share is concentrated around AT&T and Comcast, followed by Valley Internet. Combined, those three account for 81.5% of all subscriptions in the study (Figure 2). Figure 2. People were then asked what level of service they were subscribed (Figure 3). Choices were arranged to determine if their subscribed speed met the downstream requirement of served for different State and Federal level served standards. We found the nearly half of respondents did not know or did not have a current internet subscription. Of the people who knew their service level, 38.7% qualified as served under the FCC standard of 25 Mbps and 82.7% qualify as served under the current CASF standard of 6 Mbps. Upstream speed was not asked because we expected many people would not know and would only reduce the response rate for this question if asked. The survey then asked if they were willing to take part in an internet testing effort. If they chose Yes, respondents were asked about how much they pay for internet service. We felt questions about cost

3 may be more sensitive for some people and decided to give respondents the option to skip these questions. Over 77% of participants chose Yes and answered questions about broadband cost (Figure 4). We found that most commonly, participants pay $60 - $99 per month. More expensive services tended to be cable internet with Comcast. Dial-up internet services like Juno and AOL were both less than $20 per month. Figure 4. Respondents were then asked, How much would you be willing to pay for improved service? After review of the responses of that question we felt the question may have been misinterpreted. Many people responded that were willing to pay less than what they currently paid, for improved service. This seemed to indicate that perhaps they interpreted it has how much additional would they pay. For this reason we have omitted the results from this report. However, answers to this question are included in the complete survey response spreadsheet found in Appendix B. Lastly the survey asked if participants would sign up for new service if it was made available. Nearly 37% of participants said they would sign up for new service and another 60% would maybe sign up. This suggests that dependent on price and service quality, a new ISP offering may have a significant take rate. Maps of the distribution of survey responses are found in Appendix C. CalSPEED Results After completing the survey, respondents were urged to download CalSPEED for their desktop/laptop computer and run performance tests as often as possible. In total, 98 different people ran 733 CalSPEED tests during the testing period. The complete CalSPEED results spreadsheet can be found in Appendix D. Figure 5 display s the cumulative mean speeds for each provider across the county. Figure 6 display s the volume of tests collected by each provider and by how many unique address locations. Comcast, AT&T and Valley Internet round out the top 3 providers, with greatest volume of measurements from the most locations.

4 Figure 5. Figure 6. Urban vs. Rural Next we looked at the urban areas vs rural areas. Urban and rural was defined by the 2010 Decennial Census data by census block classification. When aggregating all providers we found that rural areas had downstream throughput 30% slower than in urban areas. Upstream speeds were similarly 28% slower in rural areas. See figure 7 for a comparison of urban vs rural.

5 Figure 7. Maps for each provider s downstream speed can be found in Appendix E. Lastly we looked at the CASF served status based on the tested results from CalSPEED at each location. We found that overall across all providers, 61.2% of locations were served and 38.8% of locations where either under or unserved. This amounts to a 21.5% reduction in the served status compared with the results of the survey. Appendix F shows all CalSPEED results have been mapped by the current CASF Served Status definition. Test locations with mean speeds at or above 6 Mbps Downstream / 1.5 Mbps Upstream are served. Below served but above 768 Kbps Downstream / 200 Kbps Upstream is underserved. Below underserved in unserved. Some CalSPEED measurements tested into the unserved category.