The Mission to Get Pennsylvanians Online

The Pennsylvania Broadband Research (PBR) Institute—a collaboration between the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center at the Annenberg School and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University—is researching and promoting ways to get Pennsylvanians — and other Americans — online. For years, members of the Institute have studied internet access in Pennsylvania and across the country, looking at broadband costs, infrastructure, policy, and access. Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair of Telecommunications at Penn State, mapped broadband connections across Pennsylvania in 2018 and found that there wasn’t a single county in the state where at least 50 percent of the population received broadband connectivity, despite Federal Communications Commission reports stating otherwise, while Christopher Ali (Ph.D. ‘13), Penn State Pioneers Chair of Telecommunications, traveled through rural America to investigate the progress of broadband projects subsidized by the government. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the consequences of not having access to reliable internet came into stark relief, says institute member Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at Annenberg and MIC Co-Director, as families struggled to connect to telehealth appointments or stream classes held on Zoom. In 2022, Pickard and MIC Postdoctoral Fellow Pawel Popiel examined efforts to close the digital divide in Philadelphia during the pandemic, finding that strategies to get residents online failed to address basic digital access gaps along racial and class-based lines.