Research

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition released a new cost study and broadband strategy focused on rural broadband deployment. The cost study estimates that it will cost less than $20 billion to connect all unserved schools, libraries, health providers, community colleges, and other anchor institutions (outside of Alaska) to fiber.

This report summarizes information about Internet access connections in the United States as of December 31, 2016 as collected by FCC Form 477. For purposes of this report, Internet access connections are those in service, over 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction, and reported to the FCC through Form 477. The report includes data on total and residential Internet access connections by downstream and upstream speed, by technology, by geography, and over time.

As of September 30, 2017, only two BTOP infrastructure projects remained in active status: Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System Authority (LA-RICS) and the Executive Office of the State of Mississippi (Mississippi). All remaining projects completed their project activities. NTIA continues to protect taxpayer investments by proactively engaging with these grant recipients to monitor project activities and grant compliance. Each quarter, the active BTOP recipients also report their financial and project performance.

The results of a study of Internet (non)use in three neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. The findings of this study identify key digital divides within these neighborhoods, and illuminate a common pattern of Internet use in the city – what might be called Detroit’s Internet ecosystem – that helps explain the relative lack of Internet access across its households. The findings provide the basis for a set of recommendations for narrowing the digital divide, including ways to address such issues as the affordability of the Internet.

The most ideological members of Congress shared news stories on their Facebook pages more than twice as often as moderate legislators between Jan. 2, 2015, and July 20, 2017. Members of Congress with very conservative or very liberal voting records shared news links in about 14% of all their posts. But members with more moderate ideology scores shared links to news stories in just 6% of their posts. Some of the outlets included in the study were linked to exclusively by Democrats or by Republicans in Congress.

In this report, I inaugurate the first in a series of big data analyses that will chart long-term trends. In the same way that researchers track political, economic, and social activities, it is useful to deploy social media and event histories to identify patterns in internet search behavior regarding President Doanld Trump. Using this information, I find several important developments:

Results of the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media, and Democracy show that most Americans believe it is now harder to be well-informed and to determine which news is accurate. They increasingly perceive the media as biased and struggle to identify objective news sources. They believe the media continue to have a critical role in our democracy but are not very positive about how the media are fulfilling that role. Key findings:

Publics around the world overwhelmingly agree that the news media should be unbiased in their coverage of political issues, according to a new survey of 38 countries. Yet, when asked how their news media are doing on reporting different political issues fairly, people are far more mixed in their sentiments, with many saying their media do not deliver.

On a typical weekday, three-quarters of US Latinos get their news from internet sources, nearly equal to the share who do so from television. For years, TV was the most commonly used platform for news among U.S. Hispanics. In recent years, however, the share getting their news from TV has declined, from 92% in 2006 to 79% in 2016. Meanwhile, 74% of Hispanics said in 2016 that they used the internet – including social media or smartphone apps – as a source of news on a typical weekday, up from 37% in 2006.

By one recent estimate about 8.9 percent of Americans, or about 29 million people, lack access to wired home “broadband” service, which the Federal Communications Commission defines as an internet access connection providing speeds of at least 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. Even where home broadband is available, high prices inhibit adoption; in one national survey, 33 percent of non-subscribers cited cost of service as the primary barrier. Municipally and other community-owned networks have been proposed as a driver of competition and resulting better service and prices.