Adoption

Libraries are a lynchpin for national, state, and local digital inclusion efforts—particularly our 16,500+ public library locations across the country.

[Commentary] On November 16, 2017, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on an item that will impact the commission's Lifeline program, which provides discounts on telecommunications services for qualifying low-income consumers. On October 26, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released a draft of the item in advance of the November vote. Here we break down the rules that the FCC plans on changing immediately at the November meeting, the new proposals the FCC is seeking comment on, and the more general evaluation the FCC is launching into the program's "ultimate purposes." [Kevin Taglang]

Axiom is more than just a technology and broadband services provider. The company -- along with AETC -- is leading a digital equity movement in Maine which it plans to take national in the years ahead. The key to its national push is the recently-announced National Digital Equity Center (NDEC). NDEC, as a part of the AETC nonprofit arm, will seek to engage communities all over the country to provide the expertise needed to mobilize broadband technologies through digital inclusion, literacy efforts, education, resource planning, funding research, and infrastructure leveraging and stakeholder engagement.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced the creation of a $35,000 Digital Equity Fund, which will support the City's goal of ensuring all residents have equal access to digital services.

The Digital Equity Fund will provide support to community-based organizations that help Boston residents fully connect and participate in today's media and information landscape. The Digital Equity Fund will explore ways to build individual and community capacity to:

• Use the Internet, digital skills, and digital tools to pursue professional, educational, and civic endeavors;
• Engage with the Internet safely and securely;
• Develop needs-responsive, community driven digital skills building opportunities;
• Increase broadband adoption among the roughly 1 in 5 Bostonians who do not subscribe to this service in the home.

In 2017, Boston will award one grant of $35,000 or up to two grants up to $17,500 each to nonprofit organizations that promote digital equity. By providing seed funding, the City hopes to identify promising strategies that can attract outside funding and further create a City where everyone has the tools and skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.

This Digital Playbook provides several core strategies for increasing digital equity and inclusion, ensuring that all community members will have the necessary resources for full participation in the economic, political, and civic opportunities available within Charlotte, North Carolina.

A point often lost when we talk about the digital divide is what happens when we actually bridge the divide. Too often, we declare mission accomplished when we’ve connected a home that has been forever without, but I challenge you to take a more nuanced view. We should only claim victory when a consumer is meaningfully using their connectivity to take advantage of the economic, educational, and health care opportunities it affords....

One of our primary goals at the Federal Communications Commission is to be good stewards of ratepayer dollars. That means moving away from the past practice of using our high-cost program to fund multiple networks in the same geographic area. We should not support a company that is serving an area where another provider is providing quality service without a subsidy. That is fundamentally inconsistent with protecting consumers and it does not enable the market to work as intended.

In this case study, we argue that barriers to broadband access, one aspect of the digital divide for low income communities of color, stem from a myriad of factors including deregulation of the telecommunications industry and a history of segregation of and disinvestment in neighborhoods of color. Specifically:
The deregulation of the telecommunications sector in the 1990s allowed sweeping consolidation of the industry and created a broadband market with significantly less competition between firms, steeper prices, and slower speeds compared to other industrialized nations.
Regulators do not hold internet service providers (ISPs) accountable to universal build out requirements, which the government enacted in exchange for granting monopolies in the market. This monopolized and deregulated environment has allowed ISPs to upgrade digital infrastructure in the most profitable, high-income areas first. The persistence of de facto racial segregation of neighborhoods means such investments (and lack thereof) result in digital redlining of a disproportionate number of neighborhoods of color and rural areas of all races.

While broadband internet access has increased over time, there remains a digital divide in access to and adoption of high-speed internet. Closing this gap must be a priority, and will take a substantial federal investment to do. There are still 34 million residents that do not have at least one broadband provider in their community. While nearly all of Connecticut has access to high-speed internet, more than one third of Mississippi’s residents lack access. At local levels, the disparities get larger. In more than 200 counties, no one has access to broadband internet. Congress must prioritize rural broadband expansion in any national comprehensive infrastructure plan debated in the 115th Congress.

Further, Congress needs to work on closing the gap in at-home internet usage. All Americans can benefit from having the internet in their homes, giving them better access to educational, health, and career-related resources. Bridging this gap will require improving competition to bring consumer costs down and expanding efforts to subsidize home broadband subscriptions.

With the growing use of the Internet for information, education, job hunting, and other activities, its economic value increases. The incidence of in-home Internet subscriptions, however, varies across households, and Native American households are less likely than other American households to subscribe to Internet services. The lack of universality has, potentially, enormous consequences for households not subscribing to the Internet. Using descriptive statistics and logistic regressions we find that the growth of U.S. Internet subscriptions may have peaked and exhibited a small decline between 2012 and 2015; technology adoption has reached the third stage of the S-curve. Internet adoption in Native American households, however, may not have fully reached into the third stage. While rural-urban location is a small factor for non-Native American households, it remains a major factor for Native American households.

In “Signs of digital distress: Mapping broadband access and subscription in American neighborhoods,” the authors also examine broadband subscription, and find that in 2015, nearly a quarter of Americans lived in “low subscription neighborhoods,” where fewer than 40 percent of households subscribed to broadband (here defined per FCC data as 10Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload), and which contain nearly 18 million children.
Top 5 Performers: 1) Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville (FL) 2) Honolulu (HI), 3) Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk (CT), 4) New YOrk, Newark-Jersey City (NY,NJ,PA), 5) Boston-Cambridge-Newton (MA,NH)
Bottom 5 Performers: 1) Jackson (MI), 2) Augusta-Richmond County (GA, SC), 3) Birmingham-Hoover (AL), 4) Tulsa (OK), 5) Fresno (CA).