In light of the ongoing pandemic, the Federal Communications Commission finds good cause to extend its prior waivers of certain Lifeline program rules governing recertification, reverification, general deenrollment, subscriber usage, income documentation, and documentation requirements for subscribers residing in rural areas on Tribal lands through November 30, 2020. The FCC will continue to monitor the situation to determine whether any additional extension of these waivers is appropriate.

For all the talk of Generation Z’s Internet savvy, a stunning number of young people are locked out of virtual classes because they lack high-speed Internet service at home. In 2018, nearly 17 million children lived in homes without high-speed Internet, and more than 7 million did not have computers at home. The issue affects a disproportionately high percentage of Black, Latino and Native American households — with nearly one-third of students lacking high-speed Internet at home. Students in Southern states and in rural communities also were particularly overrepresented.

Internet usage soared 25% within a few days in mid-March as the coronavirus pandemic started forcing Americans to stay home and is bound to remain substantially higher than before the pandemic. The increased internet usage has pushed broadband providers to perform round-the-clock enhancements on their networks, in hopes of minimizing hiccups to connection and speed.

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed many hard truths, and one of them is our nation’s digital divide. In Illinois, the Office of Broadband, through its Connect Illinois broadband program, is working to ensure broadband use by everyone in the state.

Roughly 3 million students across the United States don't have access to a home internet connection. A third of households with school-age children that do not have home internet cite the expense as the main reason, according to federal Education Department statistics. But in some rural places, a reliable connection can't be had at any price. The void is especially acute in eastern Kentucky. Many districts have been scrambling  to set up paper-based alternatives to online instruction or create WiFi hot spots in school parking lots and other public areas.

The key missing component of nearly every proposal to solve the connectivity problem is evidence — evidence suggesting the ideas are likely to work and ways to use evidence in the future to evaluate whether they did work. Otherwise, we are likely throwing money away. Understanding what works and what doesn’t requires data collection and research now and in the future. It doesn’t have to be this way. The pandemic did not only lay bare the implications of the digital divide, it also created a laboratory for studying how best to bridge the divide.

Money spent getting high-speed internet into more people’s hands is money well spent. Every dollar invested in broadband returns nearly four dollars to the economy. In addition to expanding the reach of networks, we must focus on the cost issue. Broadband is surely an essential need for all Americans in the 21st century.

That’s why the next item on the Congressional agenda, and on a prospective Biden administration’s agenda, should be a thorough review of a system in which Internet service providers have no obligation to provide service to the areas most in need. Providing an essential service like high-speed Internet should be a requirement enshrined in law. The big telecom companies don’t see sufficient financial incentive to invest heavily in rural broadband, and no one can make them do it. Congress needs to step up and not rely on the Federal Communications Commission to solve this problem.

In this research brief, we use labor force participation and unemployment rates from 2014 to 2018 as indicators for labor market attachment, and we find disparities along these indicators based on patterns of broadband access and computer use. By analyzing patterns of broadband access, computer use, and disparities in labor market outcomes, we find that:

With distance learning plans rolling out across the country due to the coronavirus, Comcast announced a new program for cities, schools, and nonprofits to connect large numbers of low-income K-12 students to the Internet at home. Internet Essentials will add the free xFi platform for parents to connect, protect, and monitor children’s devices and online activities.
Comcast will continue to offer 60 days of free Internet service for new Internet Essentials customers.