Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

As demand for high speed Internet service has explosively increased in the United States for the past decade, the construction or upgrades of telecommunication infrastructure has also been rapidly followed. Though currently many people in urbanized areas can be provided advanced broadband services, there are still challengeable areas to be served, such as remote or low populated areas because those areas are potentially non-profitable to commercial broadband service providers. This paper addresses the spatial disparity or in a broader term, the ‘digital divide’ of the broadband access by the county level in the United States. We propose the quantified measure of the county level broadband accessibility for identifying such digital divide. The developed measure is a hybrid form of the classical gravity based potential model and network topological accessibility, encouraged from the lack of prior efforts trying to explicitly incorporate the understanding of the whole process of the Internet access. The computational tasks are performed in a GIS platform, which includes several programmed functions.