Pew to Launch Broadband Access and State Policy Explorer

Pew Charitable Trusts, which has spent more than a year studying Americans’ access to broadband, will soon be launching an online explorer inventorying the data it’s collected — including information on gaps to coverage and the policies state governments are pursuing to fill them.  The explorer will be a searchable catalog of everything from current laws and policies, to information on funding and financing, and will likely launch sometime late this summer, said Kathryn de Wit, manager of the project. “What we know at this point is that different communities can be difficult to connect for different reasons,” said de Wit. “At this point, state policy sets the framework for deployment within states. The first step in looking at whether states are effectively closing the gap is looking at policy, and that’s what my team has spent a significant amount of their time on.” This major effort has included a review of “all broadband deployment laws, statutes, codes, policies, executive orders and administrative codes across all 50 states,” de Wit said. “It was not a small undertaking, but it was important for us to do this research,” she said.