A look at the Affordable Connectivity Program’s inaugural year through interactive dashboards

The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is the most ambitious federal initiative put into place to bridge the broadband connectivity gap for low-income Americans. The ACP launched in January 2022, serving almost 10 million households that were transitioned from the Emergency Broadband Benefit program (EBB). By the end of 2022, it had enrolled another 5.4 million households for a total of about 15.4 million subscribers in December 2022. Using data from the ACS 2021 1-year estimates, our estimation is that about 55.3 million households are eligible for ACP. This represents a nationwide uptake rate of approximately 28% and, the rate of growth in new enrollments has slowed down considerably. A closer look at the data reveals significant geographical variation in the participation rate as well as in the rate of program growth since January 2022. To inform the policy conversation about ways to improve program performance, we present a set of interactive maps and dashboards that combine enrollment data from USAC with county-level demographic characteristics. They allow for comparisons within as well as across states and provide tools that help identify areas of high growth and strong program performance for policy benchmarking.