New Broadband Report Outlines Road Map for Addressing the Digital Divide

Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s is a magnum opus of broadband policy for the forthcoming decade. While there are dozens of important insights offered by the paper, perhaps the most important, are those focused on solutions to connect students who lack broadband access at home. According to estimates, 70% of teachers reportedly assign homework that requires internet access. Yet, according to the FCC’s 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, 39.8% of homes do not subscribe to high-speed broadband. As we’ve discussed in the past, where those numbers overlap is what is referred to as the Homework Gap. According to the Pew Research Center, about 15% of U.S. households with school-aged children find themselves in this gap. Of the 53.6 million households with school-aged children, about 8 million families lack a broadband subscription at home. The report provides two solutions to help close these gaps. First, author Jonathan Sallet discusses the value of Wi-Fi hotspot programs – like the one Voqal project, Mobile Citizen, operates – as a short-term solution to close this gap immediately. The second solution is to expand E-Rate, the government program that provides discounts for connectivity to schools and libraries, to cover school children at home.