The Most Revealing Broadband Adoption Maps We've Ever Seen

Map the broadband adoption rates in, say, San Antonio, and a pattern emerges that closely reflects the region's socioeconomic geography. Households in and around the downtown business district overwhelmingly have broadband. But just west of Interstates 10 and 35, in the adjacent neighborhoods that are home to many of the city's Hispanic poor, fewer than 20 percent of households do.

From there, starting at the urban core and moving into outer neighborhoods, then into the northern suburbs and beyond, broadband rates appear to swell with income. A related pattern recurs in many cities: People are online in droves – watching Netflix, paying bills, reading the day's news – downtown and in the suburbs, but not so much in inner-city neighborhoods.