Journal Press India^®

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Internet use has grown rapidly over the last 15 years and so has its integration into the rural economy. Connecting to the Internet via high-speed technology such as DSL lines, cable, satellite, and wireless networks increases bandwidth and makes the Internet much more useful to businesses, households, and governments. Overall increased Internet access speed has ignited an explosion of electronic commerce. Rural and farm communities have not been left out.  Using  descriptive  statistics  and  binomial  logistic  regression  we  find: Farms buying over the Internet were more likely to have converted, supporting the argument that users find positive utility in acquiring broadband Internet access. The larger farm operations, as measured by the economic class, were more likely to convert to broadband access (after taking into account that the largest farms were the most likely to have had broadband access by 2005). DSL service was the most common broadband Internet access option among farms, unlike what has been occurring in highly urbanized areas of the country where cable and fiber optics have had the largest gains over the last few years. While broadband Internet access availability is necessary for take-up of broadband Internet access, there are other factors that are also limiting broadband Internet use such as price of access, age of user, household income, and educational attainment.

Keywords

Farm Business, Digital Economy, Internet Access, etc.

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