Dr. Pawel Popiel and Dr. David Elliot Berman are Marjorie & Charles Benton Opportunity Fund fellows. As part of the Equitable Broadband in Urban America Research Group, they are examining the implementation and impact of subsidized broadband programs, focusing on the work of Digital Navigators.

Public policy analysis overwhelmingly hews toward the quantitative. In the context of broadband policy research, quantitative data gleaned from surveys and other sources can illuminate how connectivity initiatives like the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) perform based on standardized metrics like enrollment counts, fund distribution, and the speed of broadband connections. However, these standardized metrics tell us little about how these initiatives affect the daily life of the very people enrolled in and often dependent on government subsidies for basic internet service. In contrast, qualitative research methods—such as interviews, focus groups, and ethnography—can offer granular insights into the human impact of broadband policy. 

We examined how low-income Philadelphians got online during the rollout of the ACP, which offered subsidies to eligible low-income subscribers for low-cost internet service. We explored how low-income residents encountered and navigated the tapestry of public, private, and nonprofit institutions that together comprise Philadelphia’s digital equity landscape.

Our research revealed three central findings. First, participants tended to learn about ACP through word of mouth rather than from official outreach initiatives. Second, participants felt that Comcast’s Internet Essentials plan was a second-class internet service that was insufficient for their everyday connectivity needs. Finally, uncertainty about the future of ACP and its eventual expiration caused significant stress among participants. 

Talking About Internet Access

On June 1, 2024—the day after the ACP officially ended—we conducted three focus groups with ACP-eligible Philadelphia residents who subscribed to low-cost internet services.¹ To recruit participants, we worked with both a promotional company and members of Philadelphia’s Digital Literacy Alliance (DLA)—a network of municipal, nonprofit, and private actors promoting digital connectivity and equity in the city—to distribute flyers throughout the city. We prioritized neighborhoods targeted by Digital Navigators, namely DLA nonprofits tasked with conducting outreach to low-income residents and assisting them with ACP and low-cost internet plan enrollment. 

Talking to people has two strengths over employing quantitative research methods, such as surveys. First, conversations can be less structured than rigid survey questions, opening up room for elaboration and deeper insights into people’s lived experiences. Second, focus groups are fundamentally social: they are a conversation not only with researchers, but also with other participants. Group conversations—especially around sensitive topics like household finances and poverty—may be more conducive to sharing experiences than individual survey responses or even one-on-one interviews. 

Focus Group Insights: Experiencing the Digital Divide

In talking to Philadelphia’s low-income internet subscribers, we learned that interpersonal social networks were especially effective in spreading awareness about ACP and low-cost internet service such as Comcast’s Internet Essentials program. Despite municipal outreach efforts, conversations about ACP and Internet Essentials that took place on porches, in corner stores, and through WhatsApp messages were central to how low-income Philadelphians found out about ACP and got online both during and after the COVID pandemic. However, word-of-mouth exchanges about ACP also had drawbacks, including relatively slow information flows that translated into delayed sign-ups.

As one focus group participant put it: 

Subsidy programs like the ACP can provide immediate relief to strained household budgets but only once the household has heard about and signed up for the program. Our focus groups showed that outreach delays have financial consequences: the lags translate to foregone, often crucial, support for internet service. 

Despite the prevailing public discourse about ACP as promoting digital equity, our research also revealed that the program actually served as a means to integrate low-income subscribers into Comcast’s tiered business model, which impacted subscribers’ daily internet use. For instance, the low-cost plan available to qualifying low-income households offered by Comcast, Internet Essentials, for which many eligible subscribers used the ACP subsidy, was often too slow to meet the needs of households with multiple school-aged children.

As one participated explained: 

Comcast’s solution to this was to bombard users with advertisements for its higher-tier, more expensive services. 

For Comcast, ACP functioned as an onramp for low-income subscribers into higher-tier plans. Our focus group participants found the trade-off of network performance for affordability to be frustrating. For example, network outages, network congestion, and slow speeds were seen as undermining the purported affordability and quality of Comcast’s Internet Essentials. 

Thus, just because subscribers were able to afford low-cost services with the help of subsidies does not mean that this service met their needs. 

Additionally, we learned that affordability for low-income internet subscribers is far more complex than traditional willingness to pay studies—which track the maximum price that consumers will pay for a good or service—generally presume. Our conversations highlighted how affordability of internet service is temporally contingent. Rather than a fixed, static dollar figure beyond which customers are unable to pay for an internet subscription, we learned that affordability is not just about the ability to pay for a connection in the current moment, but also about people’s uncertainties and anxieties about their future economic prospects. Risk, instability, structural changes, and unexpected events all shape those expectations and structure the consequences of their decisions to sign up for subsidized internet service. 

In the context of ACP, the uncertainty around the future of the subsidy—particularly as the deadline for refunding the program loomed—caused concern about whether subscribers’ plans would be affordable in the future. The essential nature of internet service and the transitory, impermanent nature of ACP subsidies caused significant anxiety for focus group participants.

As one focus group participant reflected:

This anxiety underpinned the feeling of “subscription vulnerability” identified in the 2021 Connecting Philadelphia survey, namely that many low-income households struggled to pay for internet after pandemic-era emergency internet subsidies ended. Our focus groups illuminated the lived experience of “subscription vulnerability” as a profound disruption to the daily routines of low-income internet subscribers. Subscription vulnerability was a site of anxiety-ridden financial choices between keeping their internet connection and paying for other basic goods and services. 

Unsurprisingly, the consequences of subscription vulnerability emerged following the end of ACP: a 2024 survey by the National Lifeline Association (NaLA) found that once ACP expired, 40 percent of respondents reported cutting their food budgets to afford their monthly internet bills. Moreover, the expiration of ACP had significant downstream effects on the daily lives of former recipients of the subsidy: 36 percent stopped using telehealth services and 64 percent reduced their contact with friends and family. In this way, the digital divide emerged as just one dimension of how people experience poverty. 

Public Policy and the Lived Experience of Internet Access

Although obstacles to affordability serve as a justification for programs like ACP, our focus groups reveal that the reality is far more complex. The takeaway is not just that outreach should be more effective and subsidies more stable, consistent, and longer-term. In addition, the current approach to tackling the digital divide prioritizes short-term cash infusions over stable solutions operating at timescales that effectively reduce risk and uncertainty for low-income communities experiencing financial precarity, alleviating the daily stresses of financial planning in the long term. 

Over the course of our focus groups, we came to see digital equity as inextricably linked to much broader struggles for economic justice. If the policy goal is to promote equitable, universal internet service, then temporary, unpredictable subsidies are not the solution. These temporary subsidies place significant burdens on recipients and present them with a dilemma for how to maintain connectivity, since many recipients cannot afford their internet plan after the subsidy expires. At this point, internet service had become woven into the fabric of their daily life, with subscribers depending on it for a range of basic activities, from virtual medical appointments to maintaining contact with loved ones. Subsidies like ACP bolster the revenues of the very internet providers that price quality internet services out of reach for many Americans in the first place. 

Notes

1. Our focus groups comprised 28 residents. Each focus group lasted 90 minutes. Each participant received a $100 gift credit card as an incentive and compensation for their time.

Pawel Popiel is an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. David Elliot Berman is an Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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