Already Being Built: What Rural Broadband Subsidies Paid For, 2018 to 2025

Governments spend billions of dollars to bring broadband to places that lack it. This report asks how much of the new service in the places six programs came from the subsidies, and how much would have arrived anyway. We compare the areas each program funded with similar areas it did not fund, track both over time, and call the difference the program’s effect. The main measure is access, whether a location can buy at least 100/20 Mbps from a wired or licensed wireless provider. A location is what Federal Communications Commission’s data call a broadband serviceable location, a structure where service is or could be installed; a multiunit building counts once, and businesses count as well as homes. We also measure fiber where a program set out to build it, adoption, and measured speeds, and we restate each access effect as years of earlier service and a public cost per location-year. Through 2025, the answer is that the programs mostly paid for service that was coming anyway and bought time.