It's no secret that the Federal Communications Commission doesn't have the best track record when it comes to measuring broadband. “The Commission must make more robust changes to accurately understand the state of broadband access and adoption across the country,” Access Now, Benton Institutue for Broadband & Society, New America's Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge and other organizations say in a filing with the FCC. The groups ask the agency to collect a host of granular data, including “address-level broadband deployment data” showing where providers offer service, and detailed information about how actual upload and download speeds compare to advertised speeds. Access Now and the others also want the FCC to gather information on pricing, arguing that cost is “one of the biggest barriers to broadband adoption and price is a primary reason why millions of Americans do not have high-speed broadband access.” They add that 42% of homes that earn less than $20,000 a year have wireline broadband service, compared to 83% of households earning more than $100,000 a year. “Despite the importance of pricing data, no government agency collects this information,” they write. “That must change, and the Commission is ideally situated to collect this data through its existing reporting requirements for broadband providers.”

The 2010s are defined by our total absorption into the digital. Engaging online quickly became a necessary part of being a person. “As more people began to register their existence digitally, a past time turned into an imperative: you have to register digitally to exist,” journalist Jia Tolentino writes. With that, she said, came the commodification of self, which keeps us endlessly tethered to the web, either as a means of self-promotion or as a way of feeding the human compulsion to connect. As we’ve remained here, our internet selves have grown more robust. They are more than just usernames and passwords and web addresses and credit card numbers. They are our opinions, a #mood, a list of likes and muted channels. They are our phone numbers and where our packages are delivered and what time we go to sleep at night. We have sent these perfect little representatives into the cloud to prove our existence and in the process made ourselves infinitely knowable to friends, fans, haters, and massive global corporations.

In South Korea, where the next-generation wireless network has been rolled out widely, download speeds have risen but many users aren’t impressed. 5G hasn’t lived up to the hype. For most of 2019, South Korea was home to the vast majority of the world’s 5G users, offering the broadest lessons in what the next-generation network has to offer. Though it is still early in the global rollout, 5G service in South Korea has proved more of a future promise than a technological breakthrough.