How States Are Tackling Broadband Affordability
Friday, September 12, 2025
Weekly Digest
How States Are Tackling Broadband Affordability
You’re reading the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s Weekly Digest, a recap of the biggest (or most overlooked) broadband stories of the week. The digest is delivered via e-mail each Friday.
Round-Up for the Week of September 8-12, 2025
This week, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society released "Achieving Affordability: State Strategies for Getting Everyone Online," an examination of how states are working to make high-speed internet more affordable for their residents. With the release, Benton Research Director Dr. Caroline Stratton hosted a discussion on how broadband affordability, availability, and adoption relate to each other and present current and future opportunities to improve universal access. The conversation included a handful of affordability experts––including the report's author, Jordan Arnold.
Achieving Affordability: State Strategies for Getting Everyone Online
When it comes to broadband affordability, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, there are multiple viable strategies that states are actively taking to tackle the issue.
"The impetus for the report was this recognition that the federal government has really stepped back from affordability since the peak we saw during COVID," Arnold said.
Because of this shift, the states have become "laboratories of innovation" around broadband affordability, according to Arnold. But that does not mean every state is in the same place.
Some state governments have long prioritized broadband affordability; others are only now stepping in to fill the vacuum left by Washington.
The Trump Administration has rolled back Digital Equity Act funding and restructured the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, scaling back what were strong protections for low-income consumers. And Congress has failed to act: proposed legislation to continue the Federal Communications Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) died in the 118th Congress, and the bipartisan Universal Service Fund Working Group hasn’t offered any alternatives either.
So, the states have stepped in. Arnold highlighted states that have seen success implementing solutions and covers the conditions that made each state ripe for the opportunity it pursued.
"Hopefully [people] can see their own state sort of mirrored here, and what [their state] might be able to accomplish for affordability for its residents," she said.
Adoption and Affordability
The need for affordability is punctuated by the fact that broadband adoption growth rates have stalled, especially for home broadband service.
Benton Senior Fellow John Horrigan broke down current adoption trends and how affordability comes in based on his research released earlier this summer titled "Marking Progress, Targeting Gaps: Lessons From Broadband Adoption Trends."
During the COVID-19 pandemic, broadband adoption skyrocketed nationwide.
"Looking at American Community Survey data, you can see a big jump from 2019 to 2021 when the pandemic was at its worst, when lots of initiatives such as the Emergency Broadband Benefit [and] efforts by philanthropy and the private sector to get more people online...really started to pay off and show up in the data," Horrigan said.
Since the peak of the pandemic, Horrigan has seen a "flattening" in broadband adoption for a few reasons. The first is the cost of living. As pandemic-induced income support went away, consumers had to make tougher budgeting decisions, and sometimes that meant cutting broadband service. At first, the ACP helped to reduce any potential losses in broadband adoption by subsidizing broadband subscriptions.
"The Affordable Connectivity Program really helped stem that tide, which is to say those trend lines would have looked worse without ACP," he said. "The ACP helped get people online and keep people online."
For those who did not have broadband service at home, Horrigan said affordability was a major reason.
"Affordability is a chief cause of people making the decision not to have broadband at home over [the] 2017 to 2023 timeframe," he said.
Relative Broadband Affordability
Ambika Nair, Community Development Research Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, discussed the concept of relative broadband affordability, the cost of broadband as it relates to a household or community's average ability to pay for service.
"Largely what leads a household to adopt broadband is not [its] willingness to pay for it, but [its] ability to pay, given monthly median income and the local cost of living," said Nair.
What Nair has found in her research coincides with Horrigan's observations on adoption rates, with lower levels of adoption across specific levels of income and geographies.
"This is particularly acute for low and moderate-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas, as John rightly pointed out, because costs of living have increased dramatically over the past three to five years, particularly in the areas of housing, utilities, food, and other essential household costs," she said.
Nair added that research on the subject of broadband affordability at the community level is limited, but that her forthcoming research on relative broadband affordability will help to provide beneficial analysis on broadband prices and affordability at a community-to-community level.
"The hope is that this measure equips policymakers and other stakeholders with the information necessary to address local broadband affordability gaps," she said. "This measure specifically is the average monthly broadband price divided by the median monthly household income by census tract."
This type of layered analysis on affordability is crucial for policymakers and other stakeholders because it allows for a more complete picture of what makes broadband service affordable or unaffordable for low- and moderate-income families.
"When we think about what's affordable in terms of broadband, we not only have to think about sort of the absolute price of broadband in communities, but we need to think about sort of the financial trade-offs these households are making day to day and how we can make it easier for folks to choose broadband or an at home connection while balancing many of those other essential costs and services." –– Ambika Nair
Availability and Affordability
In 2024, Nair wrote Digital Equity in the U.S. Northeast, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The research found a link between the availability of wired broadband service providers in an area and the affordability of service in that area.
“We saw that as the number of wired broadband service providers increased within a zip code, the average monthly price for those services decreased fairly significantly. So areas with no wired broadband providers at all saw average prices of around $105 per month, but in areas with just one additional wired provider, the average price dropped to around $70 a month. And then thereafter, we continued to see incremental price decreases with each additional wired provider that was present within a zip code.” –– Ambika Nair
Arnold added that most Americans do not have competitive options for their internet providers, emphasizing that two-thirds of Americans live in an area with a broadband monopoly or duopoly.
Asked about policy interventions to increase competition and availability, Arnold said,
“Broadly, what competition policy should do is make it easier for new entrants to enter a market, right? And so there are multiple ways to think about doing this. Our colleague at the Benton Institute, Drew Garner, has done wonderful work on local permitting solutions that make it easier for new entrants to come into a market. You can also think about open access networks. These are networks that are kind of physical infrastructure that can be shared by multiple providers. And so maybe newer entrants, like electric co-ops might not have the kind of network infrastructure that they need to provide service. If a state or a local government provides some sort of open access network, then suddenly it's a lot less expensive for a local electric co-op to come in and provide service.”
BEAD
Panelists also discussed the BEAD Program and the changes to the program created by a June 6th Restructuring Policy Notice. Among the changes, the Policy Notice precluded states from setting a threshold for the low-cost service options required by the law.
While not much is currently known about the low-cost service options being proposed by BEAD grant winners, Stratton brought up the $80 a month low-cost plan Starlink plans to offer in Virginia.
Horrigan has done extensive research on affordability. He said, “Well, $80 per month has an affordable threshold, is a lot higher than what the research tells you is considered affordable by low-income households.”
He continued to explain that different households consider different price points to be affordable, with large numbers of people saying that their incomes are so constrained that nothing is affordable, while others give prices ranging from $25 to $50. “But $80 per month as an affordability threshold,” he said, “is really not a starting point.”
Looking Forward
When asked about what policies we need to see around affordability in the future, Arnold stressed that the strength of the conversation lies in what solutions states have already found and are implementing today.
"This is not a pie-in-the-sky report," she said about her research. "This is a description of things that have been feasible in states all across the country, red states, blue states. And so I hope that states will look seriously at these solutions and really think about how they might be feasible for themselves."
Arnold noted how important cooperation with different stakeholders––like internet service providers––will be in order to make progress on affordable broadband legislation.
"[Thinking] about the implications of your policy in terms of who will become your natural partners and who might push back against the policy is important," she said.
This also includes political divisions in states. Arnold emphasized that the affordable broadband solutions included in her research aren't just for red states or blue states, but are seen across all political ecosystems and are more effective if done in a bipartisan way.
"There are solutions here that can probably transcend...the traditional partisan politics that so many of us have to deal with all the time," she said.
Nair added that considering relative broadband affordability in the implementation of broadband subsidies or affordability programs at the state level will help to ensure that those efforts reach the communities that need them most.
"For practitioners who are thinking of developing broadband subsidy programs or other kinds of similar interventions, I think this type of affordability data would [help] identify the communities and households within a city or a region that are most in need of subsidies like this to make broadband truly affordable relative to local median incomes and local costs of living." –– Ambika Nair
Nair also said that having this data and this understanding of affordability needs may lead to a more equitable distribution of support.
"It offers an opportunity to allocate subsidy amounts appropriately based on the relative broadband affordability gap in each location," she said. "And so areas with a higher ratio of broadband cost to median income, as well as sort of higher relative costs of living, may require...more significant interventions than areas without."
According to Horrigan, continued investments in affordability at the federal level––whether through the Universal Service Fund's Lifeline Program or through a renewed ACP––are necessary to stem the affordability issue, which isn't going away:
"Recent economic data indicate we're entering another period of economic uncertainty with costs rising probably more significantly for low-income households than for upper-income households. So the same kind of challenges we've seen with affordability of service over the past couple of years are not going away in the coming years...Restoring that subsidy level and reforming Lifeline would really be the way forward in my view."
Please view the full discussion here.
Read More
- Achieving Affordability: State Strategies for Getting Everyone Online
- How States Are Making Broadband More Affordable
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ICYMI from Benton
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Upcoming Events
Sep 15––Universal Broadband Services: Lessons Learned and Implications for the Future (Georgetown University)
Sep 16-18––Digital Access Research Forum (Federal Reserve Banks)
Sep 18––Boosting LEO Satellite Capacity: Is the FCC’s Launch on Target? (New America)
Sep 30––September 2025 Open Federal Communications Commission Meeting (Federal Communications Commission)
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