Brookings

Brookings provides an overview of the benefits and costs of expanding broadband access and bridging the digital divide. The shift of work and school online highlighted the lack of access to high-speed broadband internet service in some parts of the US and intensified political pressure on the government to make it more widely available.

The Senate infrastructure bill gave the primary responsibility of universal broadband deployment and adoption to the states, with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) providing oversight. To help achieve the Senate’s goals, the FCC should:

Congress has done a lot more than just set goals for access to broadband services—it finally provided the funding to do so. Most recently, the Senate passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which, if passed by the House, would provide another $65 billion in funding. But to understand what the Senate both did and did not do in the new infrastructure package, we cannot simply focus on spending levels.

As the conditions of students without home broadband access or a device mirror the broad systemic inequalities of the US, Congress must do more than offer piecemeal funding to connect K-12 students to the internet.

The World Data Lab (WDL) has developed a global measurement framework of internet poverty to measure the number of people left behind in the internet revolution. People who can’t afford a basic package of connectivity—set at 1.5 gigabytes per month at a minimum download speed of 3 megabits per second (equivalent to 6 seconds to load a standard web page)—are internet-poor. WDL estimates that there are around 1.1 billion people living in internet poverty today.