Research

Consumer Reports conducted a nationally representative survey to assess Americans’ access to high-speed internet service, and gauge their experiences and satisfaction with their broadband internet service. Key findings of the survey include: 

Lumen Technologies is worsening the digital divide and failing its customers and workers by not investing adequately in the essential fiber-optic buildout that is the standard for broadband networks worldwide.

With data from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, we estimate the effect of a large-scale, government-owned broadband network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on labor market outcomes. Difference-in-Differences, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching, is used to estimate the causal effect of the network across nine labor market outcomes. We find no economically- nor statistically-significant effect on the labor market from the city's broadband investments.

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet access quality, exploiting data from the new Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Moving to high-quality, fully reliable home internet service for all Americans (“universal access”) would raise earnings-weighted labor productivity by an estimated 1.1 percent in the coming years.

The World Data Lab (WDL) has developed a global measurement framework of internet poverty to measure the number of people left behind in the internet revolution. People who can’t afford a basic package of connectivity—set at 1.5 gigabytes per month at a minimum download speed of 3 megabits per second (equivalent to 6 seconds to load a standard web page)—are internet-poor. WDL estimates that there are around 1.1 billion people living in internet poverty today.

5G is considered a key technology for society, but its implementation is surrounded by controversy. Beyond its technical aspects, 5G has become a question of security and national interest for many EU Member States as well as an international policy issue. Technological autonomy and digital sovereignty are increasingly recognized as strategic priorities on a global scale, yet the EU's position is unique for two reasons. On one hand, the EU has unintentionally become part of the playing field in the US-China dispute over technology companies and 5G.

Although digitisation offers numerous opportunities for rural areas, they still lag behind cities in terms of access and adoption of Internet-based services. This divide is the result of multiple market failures in both the demand and supply of broadband access, which have been addressed through public, private and community-led initiatives. Based on interviews and ethnographic analysis, this paper explores how community networks and public-private partnerships have contributed to promoting the delivery and adoption of superfast broadband across the rural UK.

The demand for faster broadband access is a key driver of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) adoption and fixed broadband competition, and therefore of co-investment. This paper assesses the effects on FTTH adoption and competition of FTTH co-investment. Co-investment had indeed been endorsed in the European Electronic Communication Code as a relevant option for conciliating investment and competition.

The Simultaneous Multiple Round Ascending (SMRA) Auction has become a defacto standard auction mechanism for the award of radio spectrum for commercial mobile services around the world. The winning bid price in such SMRA spectrum auctions is of interest, as it determines the valuation of the scarce resource by the mobile operators, and also indicates the revenue accrued to the governments as auction proceeds. This report uses a cross-country panel dataset to examine the determinants of spectrum prices of all the SMRA auctions held in 25 countries from 1994 to 2019.