In a sign that Americans are becoming more dependent upon their broadband Internet connection, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released numbers last week that show that as of April 2009, 63% of adult Americans have broadband connections at home. This is up from 55% in May of 2008.

Interestingly, the greatest growth in broadband adoption this past year took place among America's low-income and senior citizens households. Broadband usage among adults ages 65 or older grew from 19% to 30% over the last year, and those living in households with less than $20,000 saw a 10% jump as well as those living in households with less than $30,000 (11% increase). And this was in light of the fact that the average broadband Internet service cost 13% more ($37.10) in 2009 as it did in 2008 ($32.80).

The Pew report also states that "more! than twice as many respondents said they had cut back or canceled a cell phone plan or cable TV service than said the same about their Internet service." This means that in tough times, cell phones and cable TV take a hike before broadband Internet. I can't speak for everyone who has ditched their cell or cable TV services, but that seems like a smart move considering you can use services such as Skype or Vonage to replace your nationwide cell phone service plan and use sites like hulu.com or fancast.com (among many others) to catch up on your TV viewing.

So as more Americans both produce (uploading YouTube for instance) and consume (download) more bandwidth how do we accommodate such growth?

A gre! at short-but-sweet paper from Bret Swanson over at Entropy Economics lays out the numbers of broadband growth. He mentions that "On a per capita basis, U.S. consumers now enjoy almost 2.4 megabits per second of communications power, compared to just over 28 kilobits per second in 2000." That's about a 100-fold increase. Likewise, wireless per capita bandwidth saw a 500-fold increase in eight years.

Bret's paper also references earlier research he did on estimating future Internet (both wired and wireless) traffic. In 2008, total IP traffic reach 18 exabytes but by the year 2015 that number will grow to about 1,000 exabytes (1 zetabyte).

The Pew report shows that more Americans are coming online, and even ditching their cable TV and cell phones during these tough economic times in order to consolidate the manner in which they receive information -- it's pri! marily coming through broadband Internet connections. This will continue to escalate on an exponential scale and it is important for policymakers to connect these dots.