23,902,000 187,000 Comcast 21,520,000 21,210,000 93,000 Verizon 4,681,000 4,597,000 84,000 *Includes satellite and U-Verse subscribers The Rural Divide-Vast Areas without Broadband Streaming that is carried on broadband "pipes" requires more capacity than any other service. In much of the United States, providers have upgraded their networks and use this capacity for their and competitors' www.TechnicalPDF.com streaming content. According to FCC statistics, there were at least 96.6 million residential broadband subscribers as of December 2016. (The FCC defines broadband as 25Mbps download data rates). Download data rates of 25Mbps were available to 62.2 percent of the total 96.6 million residential broadband subscribers. However, broadband availability is not distributed evenly in the United States. There are 24 million people in the United States without wired, terrestrial broadband of 25Mpbs. These people are mainly in rural and Native American tribal areas. The scarcity of broadband puts rural employees and students at enormous disadvantages in terms of access to remote work and students' homework assignments. Moreover, it is next to impossible to attract businesses to these areas because of the lack of adequate broadband infrastructure for such considerations as remote workers and access to cloud computing. Mobile LTE service is also not as prevalent in rural as urban areas. Only 70 percent of rural areas have mobile LTE and only 64 percent of tribal areas have mobile LTE. Mobile LTE speeds are considered 10Mbps from the network to the subscriber and 3 Mbps from a subscriber to the network. This contrasts with urban areas where 92 percent of the population has access to both terrestrial broadband and mobile LTE networks. The urban-rural contrast in mobile and terrestrial broadband availability is also present in other countries such as those in Latin America, mountainous areas in Western China, and villages in India. Affordability is an additional hindrance for having broadband availability. Families in which