Toward Digital Inclusion: Broadband Access in the Third Federal Reserve District

This report provides an overview of the digital divide in the Third Federal Reserve District, with a focus on determining which groups stand to benefit the most from a concerted effort toward digital inclusion. The report describes patterns of broadband availability and adoption for the Third District (eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware) as a whole, followed by a regional comparison of digital access using a typology of broadband. This report makes a distinction between broadband availability and broadband adoption (or “subscription”) in order to better understand barriers to access. Key findings include:

• Broadband is unavailable to 13 percent of nonmetropolitan residents, compared with just 1 percent of MSA residents and 2 percent of Third District residents overall.
• The median maximum advertised download and upload speeds in MSAs (200/10 Mbps) are higher than nonmetropolitan regions (50/5 Mbps).
• There are substantial differences in the household adoption rate of broadband between different types of neighborhoods: nonmetropolitan (62 percent) and metropolitan (71 percent); LMI (58 percent) and upper-income (82 percent) neighborhoods; and predominantly Latino or Hispanic (50 percent), predominantly black (53 percent), and predominantly white (73 percent) neighborhoods.
• About 44 percent of all Third District residents live in low-uptake neighborhoods.