Nature of Internet Provider
Notes:
- This question attempts to try to determine the primary provider of
Internet access to the respondents. Major online providers are Prodigy,
Compuserve, etc., whereas local providers usually only provide connectivity
to a regional area. "Commercial" refers to gaining access through primarily
through work rather than one of the other sources.
- The three main areas of primary Internet providers are: local online
providers (41.6%), educational providers (31.6%) and via work (10.0%).
This represents a significant shift from the Third Survey, with local
online providers gaining 13.8%. This increase was mainly fueled from
a sharp drop in major online providers (8.1% Fourth vs 27.5% Third).
Most of the other categories did not change that dramatically.
- European users no longer predominantly gain access via educational
access points (45.6% Third vs 33.7% Fourth), but still do not gain access
as heavily from local providers as in the US (32.8% Europe vs 40.4% US).
By Location
Notes:
- As one would expect, Weekend users are more reliant upon connectivity
via local providers, (53.5% Weekend vs 38.9% Weekday). Weekday users
tended to have slightly stronger representation in the educational
and work access than overall users.
By Access Time
Notes:
- The strong increase of women with Educational affiliations as noted
in the Occupation Graphs, is mirrored in the
large number of women who gain Internet access via Educational affiliations
(39.3% female vs 28.4% male). This is a 10% increase from the Third Survey.
- Men are most likely to gain access via local providers (44.6%) followed
by educational (28.4%) and commercial (11.2%) means. Thus it seems that
women are not as likely to seek out Internet access as men, but will readily
use the technology if provided, e.g., via school. This notion is supported
by the findings of Who Pays for Access to the Internet
questions of this survey.
By Gender
Table of Data for All Categories
For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280