High speed Internet connections in the United States jumped from 51.2 million to 64.6 million in the first six months of 2006, the Federal Communications Commission reports.

The FCC defines "high speed" as 200 kilobytes per second in at least one direction. By that gauge, from June 30th, 2005 through June 30th, 2006, businesses and homes acquired 22.1 million more lines.

Cable modem services provided about 44 percent of those connections; DSL served up another third. Wireless, satellite, T-carrier, and fiber services took care of the rest.

45.9 million of those lines served primarily residential users, the FCC says. Available DSL provider data indicates that Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, and their affiliates sell over 80 percent of "ADSL," a common form of DSL service.

But income, region, and ethnicity make a difference in penetration rates

92.8 percent of all households in the United States had telephone service in March of 2006, according to a new FCC report. The data comes from the Current Population Survey completed by the Census Bureau in that month.

Similar data culled over the last two decades indicates that that percent has not changed much over time. In November of 1983, 91.4% of households had telephone service. The percentage of such households has never dropped below 90% and has sometimes risen as high as 95.5%.

But within that context, marked inequalities still exist between low income and higher income telephone users, further contrasted by ethnicity and region:

The Federal Communications Commission's latest statistics show that Americans are sending more text messages than ever via their wireless devices. Text message traffic volume doubled between the second half of 2004 and 2005, from 24.7 billion to 48.7 billion messages.

At the same time the number of wireless phone customers in the United States leapt from 184.7 to 213 million, a national penetration rate of about 70 percent.

The data comes from the FCC's Eleventh Annual Report to Congress on the state of competition in the Commercial Mobile Radio Services (CMRS) industry, released this week.

High speed connections to the Internet shot up by 33% last year, the FCC reports. The study defines "high speed" as a link that provides service in at least one direction at a speed faster than 200 kilobits per second (kps). A typical dial up connection usually transmits data at around 40 to 50kps. Many high speed connections now offer service at over 3 megabytes per second (mps).

Americans now run over 50,237,139 high speed lines, the FCC study, released today, concludes—up from over 37 million in 2004, and almost 3 million in 1999.

Most of these lines—42.9 million—served residential customers, who either purchased their link via Cable or DSL service. Cable modem service claimed 57.5% of high speed business; DSL took almost all the rest; 0.5% of the sample ran fiber optic connections.

While overall U.S. telecommunications revenue gained slightly from 2003 to 2004, wireless income grew much more rapidly than other forms of telephony, according to a new FCC study issued today.

The industry reported $292 billion in telecom service income in 2004, compared with $291 billion in 2003—a growth rate of about one third of one percent.

But some sectors of the telecommunications industry significantly outpaced others.

Wireless industry revenue increased by 10%, or $90 to $99 billion dollars. Meanwhile toll service revenue dropped by 8 percent, from $77 to $71 billion.

Calling Americans "voracious consumers of media services," the Federal Communications Commission says the average household watched television last year for over 8 hours a day. The average individual tuned in for 4.5 hours a day.

These are the highest levels of viewing since the Nielsen Media Research company first began measuring TV consumption patterns in the 1950s, according to the FCC's Annual Assessment of the Status of Competition in the Market for the Delivery of Video Programming, issued on February 10th.

"On average," the report concludes, "we spend close to 30 percent of our day engaged in some activity involving media, with television viewing the dominant media activity."

The FCC disclosed today that more Americans signed up for wireless devices like cell phones in 2005 than to land based access lines. 195 million Americans bought new wireless services, up from a previous count of 97 million.

The figures were released at this year's first Open Commission meeting, to which all four Commissioners attended.

In addition, FCC data indicates that Americans use their cell phones more than ever, their average minutes of use (MOUs) almost tripling to 623 MOUs a month. The price of wireless service per minute dropped in 2005 from 20 to 8 cents a minute.

The Commission praised itself for this reported growth. "Primary reliance on competition rather than regulation to safeguard wireless consumers has continued the rapid and strikingly successful development of the mobile wireless industry," one senior FCC official declared during her presentation.