Research

For the first time in its history, the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) expanded beyond administering the four universal service programs: E-Rate, High Cost (Connect America Fund), Lifeline, and Rural Health Care. In 2021, USAC rose to the challenge and successfully administered four Federal Communications Commission initiatives, collectively known as the Congressional Response Programs.

The information and communication technology, represented by the broadband Internet, has made a profound impact on Chinese urban labor market.

Sufficient access to and utilization of broadband is an ongoing concern for rural economic development. Using a rural region in Northern New York (USA), we consider the investment and operational costs of a broadband cooperative and determine service prices for which it is financially viable. Service prices need to increase 75%–131%, depending on grant restrictions, relative to existing market prices for a new broadband cooperative to become financially feasible.

This research analyzes the relation between mobile phone use – mobile Internet in particular – and employment, self-employment and job regularity in Uganda. It finds no evidence of any positive impact of mobile Internet use on employment or job quality, suggesting that either respondents do not use mobile Internet for job search practices or as a job tool, or that these uses are ineffective.

The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) announced the first of its Broadband Community Profiles designed to uncover the economic and societal impact that fiber broadband is having on rural communities across North America.

Social media companies are often accused of anti-conservative bias, particularly in terms of which users they suspend. Here, we evaluate this possibility empirically. We begin with a survey of 4,900 Americans, which showed strong bipartisan support for social media companies taking actions against online misinformation. We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election.

In October 2021, the Broadband Development Group was hired to develop a comprehensive master plan for how the state of Arkansas should approach the inequitable availability of broadband service across the state. "Significant progress has already been made to overcome the state’s broadband problem with plans in place to make even more progress," says the Broadband Development Group (BDG) report. BDG recommends Arkansas focus its efforts on providing broadband service to the remaining 110,000 underserved households not currently served by any federal grants.

This paper investigates the association between mobile broadband speed and labor productivity. Based on panel data of 116 countries from 2014–2019, it finds no robust contemporaneous relationship, but there is a significant association when a one-year lag of mobile broadband speed is introduced. The interpretation of the results is that a 10 percent increase in mobile broadband speed is associated with 0.2 percent increase in labor productivity. The results are only robust for non-OECD and low-income countries, respectively.

In the long-running net neutrality debate, a key assumption has been that broadband and broadband Internet access service are “jurisdictionally interstate.” But are they really? And what does that mean? In practice, the interstate assumption has meant that important decisions about broadband law and policy are made almost exclusively by the federal government. The “who decides” question took on new immediacy in 2017, when the Federal Communications Commission gutted federal net neutrality rules, and then attempted to preempt the states from adopting their own.

This study investigates the determinants of Internet access and its effect of it on educational inequality in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings from the study reveal that despite the increase in Internet access during the Covid-19 period, the response to the pandemic has caused education inequalities. Furthermore, economic development indicators are effective in increasing Internet access and reducing educational inequality.