Each year, the FCC issues a report (PDF) to Congress about progress in the ongoing effort to get more Americans hooked up to a fast reliable Internet connection. The FCC’s latest report indicates that America is falling well short of its goals. We talk to Zach Katz, an advisor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, about what can be learned from the latest data and what a lack of broadband means in today’s society.

“If you don’t have broadband today,” he says, “you can’t access lesson plans for many schools. health care info. It’s difficult to find jobs and apply for jobs. Listings, more and more, are exclusively online. So whereas not having broadband a few years ago might have been an inconvenience, not having it today is much more problematic for a lot of Americans.”

The lowest numbers of broadband use are in rural areas. Katz says that it gets expensive to wire up a rural area to broadband access and companies are reluctant to make that investment if there aren’t going to be many customers paying a monthly bill.

Tim Marema from the Center for Rural Strategies says even when a rural area is wired, many of the people it’s meant to serve don’t want to bother. It’s hard for them to justify paying a hundred bucks a month for a signal that might be really lousy, says Marema.

Also in this program, a breakthrough in the study of sleep disorders has arrived in the form of… a shirt.