Affordability/Cost/Price

Over the past year, Brookings Metro and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance pursued research to understand the connections between broadband and health and equity, assess the gaps in broadband access and adoption, the market and policy barriers that lead to those gaps, and promising points of intervention for local, state, and federal leaders to deliver shared value to individuals and entire communities. If broadband is essential infrastructure, the country’s digital divide confirms the challenges to bringing its benefits to every person, regardless of demographics or geography.

What gets left out of the conversation about 5G is that the service will likely be rolled out the same way as in technologies past — predominantly in wealthier areas.

The California Advanced Services Fund (CASF), a program launched in 2008 to connect all Californians to high-speed Internet, was an early success. It helped build middle mile open access fiber to hard-to-serve communities and delivered high-speed access to areas that never had Internet. It funded fiber-to-the-home to public housing, ensuring low income users had the same high-speed access that wealthy neighborhoods had. And it was rapidly closing the digital divide that low income urban and rural Californians faced, due to years of neglect from incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The North Carolina Department of Information Technology (NCDIT) shared data indices that shine a light on the state of broadband access, adoption, and how the digital divide plays out across the state. The indices look at county-level data and reveal a variety of factors. Some results are a stark reality that the digital divide has widened as technology in some regions has advanced — such as indicators that show people have only DSL service and no Internet access at all juxtaposed against those communities where a majority of folks subscribe to available fiber optic connectivity. 

The San Jose Digital Inclusion Fund in California was established about a year ago as a mechanism for closing the digital divide in this largely affluent San Francisco Bay Area city, part of Silicon Valley.

New York City unveiled a massive new Internet Master Plan in Jan that experts say is the largest and most aggressive local broadband improvement project in US history. If successful, the city's proposal could become a template for other towns and cities looking to improve broadband access and provide a leg up to regional economies.

It's budget season. Federal departments and agencies are making their funding requests to Congress for fiscal year 2021 (starting October 1, 2020 and ending September 30, 2021). And part of the ask is reporting how well an agency did achieving its FY 2019 goals. One of the primary goals of the Federal Communications Commission is to close the digital divide in rural America.

As policymakers consider digital inclusion solutions, understanding the root of the problem is important. There are a number of ways people’s decisions not to subscribe to broadband could play out. Older adults – especially those on fixed incomes – may find the monthly fee burdensome but also struggle with the skills to use the internet. Low-income households, particularly those with children, likely understand the internet’s importance, but they may struggle with service affordability.

In the coming years, 5G wireless Internet stands poised to remake the online world, its unprecedented speed enabling advances in everything from public safety to virtual reality. Within this progress, however, there exists another near-certainty — segments of the population will be left out of the advantages.

Sixty-one percent of the US population had low-priced wired broadband available to them in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to new broadband affordability research from BroadbandNow. Researchers defined low-priced service to include offerings priced at $60 or less. This was a substantial increase from the third quarter of 2019, when 52% of the US population had low-priced service available.