Research

The Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Department of Agriculture's Rural Development (USDA RD) offer this joint planning resource guide, designed to help you eliminate barriers and encourage collaboration among your stakeholders. The guide is separated into four key focus areas including infrastructure and high-speed internet expansion.

The likely expiration of the Affordable Connectivity Program, the largest ever connectivity support program for low-income households, invites a discussion about the impact of the program and what alternative policy tools are available to promote digital equity. This study offers a preliminary assessment of the ACP’s goal to promote fixed broadband among lowincome households.

More than 23 million low-income American households will soon see a new line item in monthly expense statements: prohibitively expensive internet bills. For some, the new cost will eat into other essential areas of their budget—for others, it will mean going without the internet altogether. While the federal price tag for monthly internet subsidies under the Affordable Connectivity Program comes to $8.4 billion annually, our research indicates that, for low-income communities, the economic impact of losing the ACP will be more than twice that.

Most Americans are wary of social media’s role in politics and its overall impact on the country, and these concerns are ticking up among Democrats, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

The ACCESS BROADBAND Act requires the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth (OICG) to submit to relevant congressional committees and publish on its website an annual report that contains a description of OICG’s work for the previous year and the number of U.S.

This paper studies the impact of the introduction of fiber broadband in North Carolina, through the lens of student achievement. Campbell links granular data on new fiber construction and advertised download speeds with administrative test score data and local labor market data. Exploiting variation in fiber availability at the census block group level, Campbell implements a difference-in-differences design and find modest effects on educational outcomes, roughly equivalent to lowering class sizes by one student.

“You do not like it, so you say. But try it, try it and you may.” Like Dr. Seuss’ famous green eggs and ham, the people have tried fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband and by golly, they like it. These days it’s here, it’s there and—if a pair of fresh survey reports are any indication—it's not going anywhere. New reports from Ericsson and J.D. Power show FWA beating cable and competing well with fiber rivals in customer satisfaction. J.D.

On March 14, 2024, the Federal Communications Commission concluded that broadband is not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress has allocated tens of billions of dollars to support broadband deployment so it may not come as a huge surprise that the FCC came to this conclusion. Approximately 24 million Americans (7% of the total U.S.

With the arrival of the peak smartphone era, users are upgrading their smartphones less frequently, and data growth is decelerating. To ensure effective spectrum management decisions, policy makers require a thorough understanding of prospective wireless broadband technologies, current trends and emerging issues. We identify three emerging issues necessary for successful telecommunication policy. Firstly, evidenced-based policy making needs to be able to measure effectively how much demand takes place where and how.

High-speed broadband internet access is a critically important issue for many aspects of daily life, yet populations in rural areas are often unserved or underserved with reliable internet connectivity. Expanding broadband internet coverage in rural areas may have significant economic potential, especially since it enables precision farming which in turn increases yields, particularly for row crops such as corn and soybeans.