Digital Divide

The Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) awarded $1,481,167 to help Wisconsin residents access essential telecommunications services. The PSC awarded a total of 24 grants from the 2024 rounds of the Nonprofit Access Grant Program, the Lifeline Outreach Grant Program, and the Telemedicine Equipment Grant Program, all of which are funded by the Universal Service Fund (USF). The USF was created to promote and assist with the availability and affordability of telecommunications services in Wisconsin. 

 The Affordable Connectivity Program provided a way to bridge the digital divide for over 23 million US households, but congressional inaction has led to its unfortunate end. The consequences will be devastating. Soon, many underserved families in rural and urban communities alike will have to make the difficult sacrifice of losing access to telehealth services, online learning, employment opportunities, and so much more. Reliable broadband is essential to our way of life and economy. Without it, millions of families relying on the ACP for internet access will be left out and left behind.

Residential fixed broadband internet access in the United States (US) has long been distributed inequitably, drawing significant attention from researchers and policymakers. This paper evaluates the efficacy of the Connect America Fund (CAF), a key policy intervention aimed at addressing disparities in US internet access. CAF subsidizes the creation of new regulated broadband monopolies in underserved areas, aiming to provide comparable internet access, in terms of price and speed, to that available in urban regions.

Recent research found that as the share of White non-Hispanics increases, average download and upload speeds decreases. To delve deeper into this finding and better understand the factors affecting internet speeds, this research conducted spatial error regression models looking at different groups across two points in time (2019 and 2022). Results indicate that rural, older, and poorer groups continue to be associated with slower speeds and that by 2022, these relationships became stronger, widening the divide.

In 2019, the Vermont Department of Public Service found that nearly a quarter of Vermont addresses lacked service that met the then federal benchmarks for broadband speeds (25/3 megabits per second, or Mbps). The COVID-19 pandemic only underscored the urgent need in a state that has consistently ranked near the bottom of connectivity comparisons over the past decade. Vermonters saw a lack of interest from private providers to invest in the sparsely populated rural state and recognized that communities needed to address the problem themselves.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk. The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that are suddenly logging on with Starlink, the satellite-internet service from Space X.

“It is incredibly disappointing and just plain shameful that one of the most successful bipartisan programs to close the digital divide has lapsed. Every Congressional district in the country had constituents benefiting from this program, and still, Congress failed to deliver the funding needed to ensure that over 23 million households won’t lose connectivity. While the efforts made by the program's most ardent supporters in both Chambers were commendable, the resulting lapse of ACP makes it clear that the Congressional appropriations process is ill-suited for funding affordable broadband.

The overarching goal of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, established by Congress in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is to deploy broadband networks that reach every American and provide access to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet. Congress decided to allocate BEAD funds to states and territories since they are best situated to determine the needs of their communities, but it did not change any existing federal authority to oversee broadband or pricing.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives (OMBI) has released its Annual Report for 2023.

Michigan is once again leading the country with its innovation. This time, however, the innovation isn’t new technology—but a funding strategy that would catalyze new technologies, and ensure access to jobs, healthcare, education, and government services are available and accessible in perpetuity.