Pew Research Center's recent survey of US citizens living in rural, urban, and suburban areas indicates that every one of them is using a lot more tech than they were not long ago—in the case of broadband, use has increased exponentially since 2000 across the board. Use of desktop and laptop computers is up slightly since 2008, use of smartphones is up quite a bit since 2011, and tablet use is practically astronomical since 2010.
What the results—quantified nicely in this bar chart above by our partners at Statista—show almost as well is the gap that exists between the haves and have-nots, the latter being rural Americans who have less access to tech devices and to broadband than those in other areas.
Take broadband for instance. The comparison is with Pew numbers from almost two decades ago, in 2000, when home-based broadband was still a dream for many as dial-up connections persisted (remember all those AOL discs you used to get in the mail?). The use of broadband is obviously a success by this measure, with 75 percent each of urban and suburban respondents saying they have access. But only 63 percent in rural areas can get broadband.
That's a gap of 12 percent, and you see the same gap between rural versus urban and suburban users of smartphones. Again, both are way up since Pew measured access in 2011: Rural use of smartphones has more than tripled. But 71 percent of rural access pales next to 83 percent in the metro areas.
The gap is less pronounced for tablets, with only 9 percent more suburban people having one over rural—and what's interesting is that urban users claim the same amount of access to tablet devices as rural, both at 49 percent. But I suspect that's less about access than it is about whether people in metro areas even want tablets.
There's a similar gap for PC access. Of rural respondents, 69 percent have a laptop or desktop, while 80 percent do in suburbs, an 11 point difference. PCs also saw the slowest growth (none at all for urbanites).
You can read more about it—lincluding which group is more likely to own multiple devices—in Pew's FactTank report, including the full methodology for the survey.