Research

This report summarizes information about Internet access in the United States as of June 30, 2022, as collected by FCC Form 477 and the Broadband Data Collection (BDC). [For purposes of this report, Internet access is defined as a service that allows information to be sent to or received from the Internet with a speed of at least 200 kilobits per second.] Total connections increased by about 3.4% between June 2021 and June 2022 to 517 million.

The Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Development (USDA RD) offer this joint planning resource guide, designed to help you eliminate barriers and encourage collaboration among your stakeholders. The guide is separated into four key focus areas including infrastructure and high-speed internet expansion.

The likely expiration of the Affordable Connectivity Program, the largest ever connectivity support program for low-income households, invites a discussion about the impact of the program and what alternative policy tools are available to promote digital equity. This study offers a preliminary assessment of the ACP’s goal to promote fixed broadband among lowincome households.

More than 23 million low-income American households will soon see a new line item in monthly expense statements: prohibitively expensive internet bills. For some, the new cost will eat into other essential areas of their budget—for others, it will mean going without the internet altogether. While the federal price tag for monthly internet subsidies under the Affordable Connectivity Program comes to $8.4 billion annually, our research indicates that, for low-income communities, the economic impact of losing the ACP will be more than twice that.

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

The ACCESS BROADBAND Act requires the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth (OICG) to submit to relevant congressional committees and publish on its website an annual report that contains a description of OICG’s work for the previous year and the number of U.S.

This paper studies the impact of the introduction of fiber broadband in North Carolina, through the lens of student achievement. Campbell links granular data on new fiber construction and advertised download speeds with administrative test score data and local labor market data. Exploiting variation in fiber availability at the census block group level, Campbell implements a difference-in-differences design and find modest effects on educational outcomes, roughly equivalent to lowering class sizes by one student.

As states continue to enact new restrictions on reproductive care since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, access to critical reproductive health care services have been severely threatened. Medications prescribed after a telehealth visit present a safe and effective option; expanding telehealth for prescriptions would increase access to and equity in the provision of reproductive health care. This study identifies practical and near-term opportunities to expand equitable access to women's telehealth care across the United States.

Are we witnessing the final days of the landline phone in the United States? It's possible. But in some regions and across key demographics, landlines persist. The question is: Who’s still “jumping on the horn”? To get to the bottom of this question, we analyzed trends in phone usage by adults aged 18 and over. Our analysis takes a closer look at the percentage of adults living in wireless-only (cell or mobile phone) households, those living with landline phones, and those without phones (phoneless). Key highlights of our analysis include:

Telemedicine use remains substantially higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, although it has fallen from pandemic highs. To inform the ongoing debate about whether to continue payment for telemedicine visits, this report estimated the association of greater telemedicine use across health systems with utilization, spending, and quality. In 2020, Medicare patients receiving care at health systems in the highest quartile of telemedicine use had 2.5 telemedicine visits per person, compared with 0.7 telemedicine visits per person in the lowest quartile of telemedicine use.