This cost is one reason why we are working on a model which will predict Internet access across a locality. Our focus is on GIS for policymaking tools. I will talk about this at the conference, and hopefully get some good suggestions (we'll only have preliminary data unfortunately). __ Jeremy W. Crampton President, NACIS http://www.nacis.org & http://monarch.gsu.edu/jcrampton/
The reason for this paucity is, of course, that sizing Internet user populations is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process. A really interesting doctoral thesis to read would be one which took apart and compared the various methodologies as a way of explaining the wide divergences in results. Or: data points are memes, and they travel, but in so doing they obscure their origins; call it a fetish for numbers.
cheers Bram -- / Bram Dov Abramson / babramson@telegeography.com