Research

A new report found that teens believe unreliable broadband access contributes to economic and social inequities, perceptions of reduced career prospects, significantly lower digital literacy and less confidence in their future success. Teens reveal the drastic impact that slow internet speeds have on their opportunities and urge the government to pick up the pace toward universal broadband access. Key findings include:

This paper describes the challenge of four rural broadband providers operating fiber to the home networks to recover the middle mile network costs of streaming video entertainment and quantifies the amount of the current and future shortfall. It describes the components of the rural broadband networks, policy background for their evolution, an overview of providers, and the financial calculations of cost recovery. The preliminary results show that current broadband prices are approximately $50 per month per subscriber.

The economic benefits of high-speed internet go beyond access and expansion, as examined by researchers from the University of Missouri Extension in their new study ‘The Economic Benefits of Expanding Broadband in Selected Missouri Counties.’ The study focused on three rural areas: Bollinger County has the lowest broadband adoptio

This report documents broadband initiatives at the county and city levels in areas statewide. It also highlights specific broadband access and adoption programs launched in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Corian Zacher, Next Century Cities’ Policy Counsel for State and Local Initiatives and lead researcher, said, “Ohio is well-known for innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

This analysis evaluates claims of a “broadband affordability crisis.” First, we review several international comparisons of broadband prices alongside the data on differing deployment. Any consideration of how US broadband prices stack up must take into account such deployment differences as well. Second, we provide a new analysis showing how broadband and telecom industry revenues have significantly declined as a share of the overall economy. Major findings include:

Throughout lawmakers’ partisan wrangling to iron out the details of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the popularity of major provisions held strong among voters according to new polling from Morning Consult and Politico. All of the six potential investments included in the survey received over 50 percent support from voters of all parties.

Consumer Reports conducted a nationally representative survey to assess Americans’ access to high-speed internet service, and gauge their experiences and satisfaction with their broadband internet service. Key findings of the survey include: 

Lumen Technologies is worsening the digital divide and failing its customers and workers by not investing adequately in the essential fiber-optic buildout that is the standard for broadband networks worldwide.

With data from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, we estimate the effect of a large-scale, government-owned broadband network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on labor market outcomes. Difference-in-Differences, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching, is used to estimate the causal effect of the network across nine labor market outcomes. We find no economically- nor statistically-significant effect on the labor market from the city's broadband investments.