The study, funded in part by the universal broadband advocacy group, found that consumers have been increasingly willing to spend more money for their broadband connectivity than what they're actually paying. This difference between what users are willing to pay and the actual price is known in economics as the consumer surplus and is used as a broad measure of how much benefit consumers receive from buying a particular good.

To conduct the study, economists Mark Dutz and Jonathan Orszag used data taken from Forrester Research's annual North American Benchmark Survey that polls about 30,000 heads of households every year to ask them about their broadband spending habits. Looking at the data, Dutz and Orszag found that U.S. households' demand for broadband was roughly $32 billion higher than what they actually paid for it in 2008. This $32 billion broadband consumer surplus represents a 58% increase from 2005, when broadband connectivity in the Untied States generated an estimated consumer surplus of around $20 billion, the study says.

In addition to finding an increasing consumer surplus for broadband connectivity, the study also found that demand for broadband services has become increasingly less elastic over the past five years, meaning that increases in broadband prices are less likely to lead to significant decreases in demand. In 2008, the study found that a 10% increase in broadband prices would lead to a 6.9% decrease in demand for broadband services. In 2005, by contrast, a 10% increase in broadband prices led to a 15.3% decrease in demand for broadband services.

Interestingly, price elasticity for dial-up Internet services has remained roughly the same over the same period, as a demand for dial-up services has decreased between 9% and 9.6% in response to a 10% increase in prices. In other words, it seems that access to broadband services has grown more important to consumers over the past four years while the importance of access to dial-up services has stayed roughly the same.

When the study broke down consumers' willingness to pay for broadband services, it found that younger users and users with a college education were willing to pay more money than older users and users without a college degree.