More Than a Third of Americans Have Access to One or No Broadband Provider

The Federal Communications Commission released the 2024 Communications Marketplace Report on December 31. By law, the FCC must publish a Communications Marketplace Report every two years, assessing the state of competition across the broader communications marketplace. The FCC must consider all forms of competition, including “the effect of intermodal competition, facilities-based competition, and competition from new and emergent communications services.” The FCC must also assess whether laws, regulations, regulatory practices, or marketplace practices pose a barrier to competitive entry into the communications marketplace or to the competitive expansion of existing providers of communications services. Here we take a brief look at the FCC's findings concerning fixed broadband service in the U.S. and the digital divide based on data through December 2023. For readers seeking the bottom line first: the FCC finds that more than a third of Americans have only one provider of high-speed broadband or lack access altogether.