National Digital Inclusion Alliance

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance is proud to have facilitated digital inclusion visits for newly appointed Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. After he attended a forum on the rural and urban broadband digital divide hosted by Rep Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO), Commissioner Starks attended a meeting of the Kansas City Coalition for Digital Inclusion, sharing why digital equity is important to him. He stated “Who’s job is it to make sure everyone has internet at home? It’s my job.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance is looking for nominations for the fourth annual Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Award. This year, we are excited to announce that not only one award will be presented, but two. In addition to recognizing an outstanding person who has truly made a difference in the field of Digital Equity, we wish to recognize an up and coming Digital Inclusion Practitioner as well. Nominees should exhibit some combination of the following characteristics on which the award will be based:

A series of interactive maps to visualize home internet access, covering more than 65,000 occupied Census tracts in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. On the base maps, NDIA calculated and mapped two crucial data points from census data: 1) What percentage of households in each Census tract had no home internet access at all in 2017 — not even mobile internet or dial-up connections?  2) What percentage of households in each Census tract had “Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL” in 2017?

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”), the US Treasury Department agency which serves as the Federal regulator for many of the nation’s banks, to allow those banks to seek Community Reinvestment Act credit for their financial support of community digital inclusion programs serving low and moderate income (LMI) households in their lending areas. In the comments, NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer said:

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has released its fourth annual “Worst Connected Cities” ranking, based on US Census American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2017, which was released in Sept 2018 by the US Census Bureau. NDIA ranked all 191 US cities with more than 50,000 households by the percentage of each city’s households that lack home Internet connections of any kind. This data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.

This guidebook has a twofold purpose. It is a practical guide for digital inclusion practitioners -- local community-based organizations, libraries, housing authorities, government agencies, and others working directly with community members in need of affordable home broadband service. This guidebook also contains recommendations for policymakers and internet service providers to improve current offers and establish new offers.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has called on the Federal Communications Commission to prove its commitment to “closing the digital divide” by adding home broadband affordability, the broadband adoption rates of low income households, and the digital redlining of urban neighborhoods to the issues covered by the agency’s upcoming 2019 Broadband Deployment Report.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has submitted comments to the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS), urging the agency to treat affordability for lower-income rural residents as a key factor in implementing its E-Connectivity Pilot, a new grant and loan program for financing broadband projects in rural areas that lack “sufficient” broadband access. NDIA’s comments recommend the following:

In recent years AT&T and Verizon have eliminated their cheaper rate tiers for low and mid-speed Internet access, except at the very slowest levels. Each company now charges essentially identical monthly prices – $63-$65 a month after first-year discounts have ended – for home wireline broadband connections at almost any speed up to 100/100 Mbps fiber service. This policy of upward “tier flattening” raises the cost of Internet access for urban and rural AT&T and Verizon customers who only have access to the oldest, slowest legacy infrastructure.

Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), released in September 2017 by the US Census Bureau, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked all 185 US cities with more than 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city’s households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. Note that this data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.