Research

The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favorable coverage.

Many Americans say the creation and spread of made-up news and information is causing significant harm to the nation and needs to be stopped. Indeed, more Americans view made-up news as a very big problem for the country than identify terrorism, illegal immigration, racism and sexism that way.

We examine the effects of broadband speed on county unemployment rates in Tennessee. We merge the older National Broadband  Map dataset and the newer Federal Communications Commission dataset in lengthening our broadband access data over the period 2011-2015. Extending the dataset improves the precision of the estimates. Our panel regressions control for potential selection bias and reverse causality and show that broadband speed matters: unemployment rates are about 0.26 percentage points lower in counties with high speeds compared to counties with low speeds.

Rural Americans have made large gains in adopting digital technology over the past decade, but they generally remain less likely than urban or suburban adults to have home broadband or own a smartphone.

This Opensignal looks at data from Jan-March 2019, the timeframe just prior to the first 5G services launching in South Korea and the US. We examined 87 countries and compared their performance across all five of our key award metrics: 4G Availability, Video Experience, Download and Upload Speed Experience, and Latency Experience. Key Findings:

Opensignal has benchmarked the experience smartphone users receive in every US state and the fifty largest cities immediately prior to 5G’s launch so it’s easy to see to what extent 5G offers an improvement. In the last year, the download speeds experienced by smartphone users in the US have improved little, rising from 17 megabits per second (Mbps) to 21.3 Mbps between the first quarter of 2018 and the same period in 2019. There’s lots of room for improvement but only a new technology like 5G is likely to lead to a step-change improvement in the mobile network experience. Key findings:

The Presidential Memorandum of October 25, 2018, “Developing a Sustainable Spectrum Strategy for America’s Future,” calls for the development of a National Spectrum Strategy. The development of the strategy is to be informed by three interim products, one of which is a report on emerging technologies and their expected impact on non-Federal spectrum demand, to be submitted to the President by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) or the Director’s designee. The purpose of this paper is to assist OSTP in developing the required report.

This report on recommendations for national spectrum research and development (R&D) priorities sets a vision to improve the national economic impact of electromagnetic spectrum for an increasingly wide range of communications, networking, location, and other applications while preserving and protecting national security and public safety. This priorities report is one step in defining an overall approach to position the United States as a world leader in next-generation spectrum technologies that more effectively leverage time, frequency, space, code, waveform, and networks.

The first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-in-Differences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network (“GON”) in Chattanooga (TN) on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city’s broadband investments.

Since 2004, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings on net neutrality have been caught in a vicious cycle. They have been passed, fought in court, and returned to the FCC with minor (and sometimes major) revisions.