Diversity

As anchors of the community, upgraded broadband infrastructure will help Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) serve the needs of unserved and underserved communities that are too often overlooked or ignored.

The coronavirus crisis may offer a grim preview of further marginalization for Americans of color in the coming decades, a new Deutsche Bank report concludes. "COVID is a picture of what the world might look like in the future as it gets more digitized," Apjit Walia, a technology strategist with Deutsche Bank, told Axios.

In a joint effort by Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC has created the Early Career Staff Diversity Initiative to advance equitable opportunities for underrepresented undergraduate, graduate, and law school students. The Early Career Staff Diversity Initiative has the following components:

The Benton perspective is this: Everyone in America should be able to use High-Performance Broadband, by which I mean broadband connections to the home that are robust and future-proof. Broadband competition is more important than ever because—in our current crises and beyond—America has fast-forwarded into its broadband future. Yet, New York, like the nation, has too little competition in fixed broadband to ensure that all people have the advantage of competitive pricing, quality, customer service, and innovation.

In this research brief, we use labor force participation and unemployment rates from 2014 to 2018 as indicators for labor market attachment, and we find disparities along these indicators based on patterns of broadband access and computer use. By analyzing patterns of broadband access, computer use, and disparities in labor market outcomes, we find that:

Across the rural US, more than 100 cooperatives, first launched to provide electric and telephone services as far back as the 1930s, are now laying miles of fiber optic cable to connect their members to high-speed internet. Many started building their own networks after failing to convince established internet service providers to cover their communities. But while rural fiber optic networks have spread swiftly over the past five years, their progress has been uneven.

University of Virginia Professor Christopher Ali spoke about rural broadband with the Reimagine New York Commission. The rural-urban digital divide is primarily one of infrastructure. At least 22.3% of rural Americans, or 15.8 million people, lack access to broadband infrastructure and are therefore cut off from the internet.

As schools now explore virtual education and hospitals expand to digital platforms as viable and safe options during the time of COVID-19, the focus on adequate internet access has moved to center stage. In 2018, rural North Dakota residents had access to better internet service than residents of Englewood in Chicago. A recent report showed that in some parts of Chicago, as many as half of children lack the necessary access to broadband needed to engage in the online educational activities expected of them during the COVID-19 academic disruption.

Native American communities should have the same access to the opportunities of the digital age as other Americans. Yet, internet access in Indian Country remains stubbornly and persistently low. Addressing this problem requires smart policy and a scarce resource regulated by the Federal Communications Commission known as wireless spectrum. For the first time, tribal communities have an opportunity to obtain wireless spectrum to expand broadband access on their lands—but the challenges of COVID-19 threaten to diminish its potential. The FCC can and should fix that.