Research

The purpose of Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s is to collect, combine, and contribute to a national broadband agenda for the next decade, enlisting the voices of broadband leaders in an ongoing discussion on how public policy can close the digital divide and extend digital opportunity everywhere. Leaders at all levels of government should ensure that everyone is able to use High-Performance Broadband in the next decade by embracing the following building blocks of policy:

This large-scale study explores how kids age 8 to 18 in the US use media across an array of activities and devices—including short-form, mobile-friendly platforms like YouTube—to see where they spend their time and what they enjoy most. Combined with the data from the 2015 report, the 2019 census gives us a clearer view of how young people's media use has evolved over time.

Americans’ perceptions and assessments of local media. Americans mostly believe local news media are doing a good job performing many of their democratic roles and responsibilities. Americans assess local coverage of most important local issues positively, and they generally see local media as in step with, rather than at odds with, the political leanings of their local community.

Internet use among Hispanic Americans has continued to grow, according to NTIA data, narrowing a racial disparity that has existed since NTIA began tracking adoption through its Internet Use Surveys in 1998. The proportion of Hispanic Americans using the Internet has risen from 61 percent in 2013 and 66 percent in 2015 to 72 percent in 2017, NTIA data show. Although this is still less than the 80 percent of non-Hispanic Whites online in 2017, the gap has begun to narrow.

1969 was the year that saw the first host-to-host communication of ARPANET, the early packet-switching network that was the precursor to today’s multibillion-host internet. Heading into the network's 50th anniversary, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked 530 of technology experts how individuals’ lives might be affected by the evolution of the internet over the next 50 years. Some 72% of these respondents say there would be change for the better, 25% say there would be change for the worse, and 3% believe there would be no significant change.

The landscape and geography of access to high-speed internet continues to change rapidly due to economic and regulatory changes, private investments into new technology and policy proposals leading up to the 2020 presidential election. From Q2 to Q3 2019 we saw a shift towards higher speeds, but also higher prices. With respect to pricing, since our Q2 report there have been more than 700 pricing or plan updates by internet service providers. With respect to speed, this report shows that nearly every state experienced an increase in access to 500 mbps internet.

After the Federal Communications Commission received nearly 24 million comments in the course of just one rulemaking proceeding in 2017 and its website crashed due to the volume of comments submitted simultaneously, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations initiated a review of federal commenting systems to understand their flaws and develop recommendations to improve them. The Subcommittee  found:

In 221 large and medium-size US cities, according to the latest data from the US Census, at least 30% of all households still lacked a wireline broadband connection in 2018. They are NDIA’s Worst Connected Cities of 2018. The 2018 American Community Survey One Year Estimates (ACS), released by the US Census in September 2019, include 2018 household Internet access data for 623 US cities and “Census designated places” with populations of 65,000 or more. NDIA has ranked all 623 of these communities by:

Ninety-nine percent of America’s schools now have high-speed broadband connections capable of providing enough bandwidth to enable their students and teachers to use technology in the classroom. 46.3 million students and 2.8 million teachers in 83,000 schools have the Internet access they need for digital learning. This success is due to the collaborative effort of governors in all 50 states along with federal policymakers, service providers and school districts.

The Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability Act (S. 1822) would require the Federal Communications Commission to collect detailed data twice a year on the availability of broadband internet access services. That data would be reported by providers of those broadband services. Under the bill, the FCC would establish and maintain a comprehensive database and create detailed and publicly available broadband coverage maps.