Looking beyond digital broadband speeds: Rural British Columbian’s experiences with internet connectivity as a basic necessity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: This study examined the experience of digital connectivity among rural-living British Columbians both with and without access to high-speed Internet at home. BACKGROUND: Evidence indicates that fewer rural communities have access to high-speed Internet compared to urban communities in Canada, despite government commitments to bring high-speed Internet to all British Columbians by 2027. Yet, differences within rural areas relative to those with access to high-speed compared to those with lower speeds remains a relatively unexplored area. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey of rural British Columbians both with and without high-speed Internet was conducted between October 2023 and April 2024. Closed and open-ended questions gathered participants' thoughts and experiences with digital technology access and use. FINDINGS: Overall, 461 (M age = 56 years, 72% female) rural BC community members (47% with access to 50 + Mbps download speeds) completed the survey. Despite similar overall digital readiness, skill, and confidence using digital technology, those without high-speed Internet were older, more remote-living, reported using fewer connected devices alongside greater frustration with technology, yet had comparable frequency of Internet use except for less streaming compared to those with access to high-speed Internet. Similar themes were found among open-ended responses of both those with and without high-speed Internet access and surrounded: i) the actual and potential benefits of high-speed connectivity, and ii.) disconnects on many levels, but particularly between expectations for and reality of high-speed connectivity. CONCLUSION: Regardless of broadband speed, there were greater similarities than there were differences across rural community participants, with common perceptions of the benefits of connectivity amid experiences with pervasive disconnections on a number of levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".