Digital Divide

New York State has made great progress building broadband infrastructure and ranks second in the country for the share of population with access to basic broadband speeds. However, there are still over 250,000 New Yorkers for whom broadband service is unavailable in their neighborhood, and even more for whom broadband is unavailable in their home or place of business.

The Missouri House of Representatives’ Special Interim Committee on Broadband Development is working to develop a better understanding of broadband’s role across multiple aspects of everyday living, including education, entrepreneurship and economic development, government services, precision agriculture and telemedicine. The committee asked, can we measure the extent to which affordable broadband improves educational outcomes, labor market participation, or population growth? Fortunately, researchers constantly are adding to our collective knowledge. The following data measures:

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a racial reckoning has taken place in our country that has forced public and private institutions — including the media — to acknowledge their histories of racism. Reps.

The United States must act aggressively to meet two core broadband challenges. One is to ensure that all Americans have affordable access to the Internet at levels sufficient to enable them to participate fully in modern life. The other is to ensure that all of America’s communities obtain the advanced communications capabilities they will need to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive global economy.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Universal Service Fund (USF or Fund) has been one of the nation’s most important tools for connecting our nation, including rural communities, low-income families, schools, libraries, and rural health care facilities. However, the funding mechanism that supports the Fund is under significant duress. The “contribution base” – the revenues used to calculate USF contributions – has declined 63% in the last two decades, from $79.9 billion in 2001 to $29.6 billion in 2021.

Washington may soon make the biggest broadband investment in US history, and the first draft was written in Colorado. In August 2021, the Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes a historic $65 billion for broadband. This section draws directly from the BRIDGE Act, the bill I wrote with Coloradans to reflect our state’s struggles and successes against the digital divide. As usual, Colorado didn’t wait on Washington to act; cities created their own municipal networks and electric coops deployed fiber-optic networks in rural communities at world-class speeds and prices.

Our broadband system needs help. Americans have vastly different abilities to get online or to connect at decent speeds, depending on where they live. The problem is acute in rural areas but also in cities where certain neighborhoods, often those populated by communities of color, can have far worse connections than people living just a few miles away.

Cities and urban counties across the US are raising concerns that a recent rule from President Biden’s administration could preclude them from tapping into $350 billion of coronavirus relief aid to expand high-speed internet connections. The American Rescue Plan includes broadband infrastructure among the primary uses for pandemic aid flowing to each city, county and state. But an interim rule published by the US Treasury Department has narrowed the broadband eligibility.

As far as telecommunications regulators go, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has always felt like something of a bit player compared to the Federal Communications Commission. But if the Senate infrastructure bill successfully makes its way through the House and to President Biden's desk, that could change.

Pew Research Center released a sweeping report looking at how Americans have used the internet in the pandemic, how reliant they were on digital tools, and some of the struggles they have had as they tried to conduct many of the work-related, educational, social and community activities of their lives online. The headlines from the survey included: