Research

In a previous study, CoSN examined the network connectivity experience of students who participated in virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that many students have returned to their school locations, CoSN wanted to see how things changed. Major findings of the 2022 Home Internet Connectivity Study include:

Opensignal released its July 2022 5G Experience Report. This report shows data collected between March 16 and June 13, 2022. Key findings include:

In November 2021, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, Black Brilliance Research Project (BBR), and Community Informatics Lab at Simmons University launched the six-city Digital Equity Action Research (DEAR) Fellowship. The DEAR Fellowship helped young adults, ages 19–24, learn participatory action research skills to examine and address the root causes of digital inequities in their communities. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is different from traditional research paradigms.

Broadband access is increasingly necessary for everyday activities and especially vital for businesses, remote workers, online education and health care appointments, but Empire State Development’s (ESD) New NY Broadband Program has fallen short of its mission to bring universal broadband access to New Yorkers, according to an audit by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. The program was created in 2015 to make high-speed (100 megabits per second or Mbps) broadband service “universal” in all but the most remote areas of the state by 2018.

This report assesses spectrum sharing to help observers look realistically at the prospects for sharing and barriers to realizing its more aspirational promises. Key findings include:

This study describes how one small community in western Massachusetts addressed the need for reasonably priced high-speed symmetrical broadband service through the installation of a fiber optic infrastructure that not only serves the city but has prompted and facilitated similar fiber adoption throughout the region. Through a carefully conceived and cleverly executed plan sponsored by a local utility, Westfield (MA) became one of the first cities in the state to offer 1-Gbps symmetrical Internet connectivity to residents, schools, hospitals, and businesses.

This study was commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to understand how news is being consumed in a range of countries. Research was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire at the end of January/beginning of February 2022. 2021’s report contained some positive signs for the news industry, with higher consumption and rising trust amidst a second wave of Coronavirus lockdowns.

Consumers, regulators, and internet service providers (ISPs) all use client-based "speed tests" to measure network performance, both in single-user settings and in aggregate. Two prevalent speed tests, Ookla's Speedtest and Measurement Lab's Network Diagnostic Test (NDT), are often used for similar purposes, despite having significant differences in both the test design and implementation and in the infrastructure used to conduct measurements. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of Ookla and NDT7 (the latest version of NDT), both in controlled and wide-area settings.

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) has the potential to address several of the primary issues historically associated with broadband access in America, including funding concentration among few internet service providers (ISPs), unreliable data regarding broadband coverage, and device ownership disparities on the basis of income and age. This project studied a set of outstanding broadband projects using ARPA funding to understand how localities are addressing the critical issues of accessibility, affordability, and adoption to infuse equity into their broadband expansion efforts.

The study of information and communications technology (ICT) adoption signals that diffusion processes within highly unequal societies produce stratification in the access to digital technologies