Universal Broadband

North Carolinians aren’t the quickest adopters when it comes to broadband. Despite the fact that around 94.8 percent of North Carolinians have access to high-speed internet, only 59.4 percent of households adopt it, according to the Federal Communications Commission. “It’s pretty low. That’s a good 40 percent of the population that has access but is still not adopting,” said Amy Huffman, NC Department of Information Technology’s digital equity and digital inclusion program manager. It affects rural and urban areas equally. “That’s a big problem,” she said.

Benton Senior Fellow Jonathan Sallet called for a new national broadband agenda. Over the past year, Jon has been talking to broadband leaders around the country, asking about who’s currently connected and who’s not. You can read Jon’s findings in Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s. Jon delivered the keynote address at the Broadband Communities conference in Virginia on Wednesday.

The Northeast Michigan Council of Governments (NEMCOG), in conjunction with Connected Nation Michigan, has created a vertical asset inventory for the region, which is largely rural. The project identifies and catalogs publicly and privately held assets upon which wireless equipment can be mounted. These structures include silos, water towers and the like. The interactive tool can be accessed at Discover Northeast Michigan. Identifying these assets is vital in rural areas that long have lagged in broadband penetration.

World Wide Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned that the internet's power for good is being 'under threat'. The computer scientists spoke out on the Internet's 50th anniversary saying it has been 'subverted' by those spreading hatred and threatening democracy. He urged governments, campaign groups and individuals to back a new plan from his foundation to make the internet safe, fair and accessible to all.

Internet use among Hispanic Americans has continued to grow, according to NTIA data, narrowing a racial disparity that has existed since NTIA began tracking adoption through its Internet Use Surveys in 1998. The proportion of Hispanic Americans using the Internet has risen from 61 percent in 2013 and 66 percent in 2015 to 72 percent in 2017, NTIA data show. Although this is still less than the 80 percent of non-Hispanic Whites online in 2017, the gap has begun to narrow.

Better mobile phone coverage in the British countryside has moved a step closer after the government and the telecoms regulator backed an industry plan to share masts and build new towers in very remote areas. Mobile operators spent months thrashing out an agreement to allow access to each other’s masts in rural areas to improve patchy coverage, but it was contingent on Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, revising the rules of an impending sale of spectrum for 5G services. The regulator on Oct 25 confirmed the changes had been agreed.

Christopher Terry recently published an article for the Benton Institute that details how the National Broadband Plan has failed. In my opinion, the National Broadband Plan never had the slightest chance of success because it didn’t have any teeth. Congress authorized the creation of the plan as a way for politicians to show that they were pro-broadband.

On October 23, the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI), launching its annual review to determine if broadband is reaching all Americans in a timely fashion.  Finding in the negative, the FCC must take immediate action to accelerate broadband deployment by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market. Over the next seven weeks, the FCC will collect public input to help guide its analysis.

When I first took office, President Donald Trump directed me to lead the Rural Prosperity Task Force, a team of federal, state and local leaders focused on improving the lives of those who live in rural America. The task force’s top takeaway was how critical access to broadband is in rural communities. I always say, investing in the expansion of rural broadband is as vital as the rural electric and telephone networks were decades ago.

The landscape and geography of access to high-speed internet continues to change rapidly due to economic and regulatory changes, private investments into new technology and policy proposals leading up to the 2020 presidential election. From Q2 to Q3 2019 we saw a shift towards higher speeds, but also higher prices. With respect to pricing, since our Q2 report there have been more than 700 pricing or plan updates by internet service providers. With respect to speed, this report shows that nearly every state experienced an increase in access to 500 mbps internet.