How the Pandemic Changed Broadband

 There are several important changes to the broadband industry that came out of our collective pandemic experience.

• Many millions of people suddenly cared about upload speeds,
• The main impact for ISPs of having customers working from home is that it created a lot of customers who are intolerant of broadband outages, and
• There was so much press about poor rural broadband that I think this was the first time that a lot of urban and suburban people realized that rural folks don’t have the same broadband.

[Benton has been tracking Coronavirus and Connectivity since 2020. See https://www.benton.org/coronavirusandconnectivity]