Research

Half of Americans now have access to broadband at speeds of 500 Mbps or above. But less than half of Americans (48.5%) have wired broadband available at $60 or less per month. Availability of 500 Mbps service varies considerably from one state to another. More than 90% of people in Delaware (97%) and the District of Columbia (99%) have 500 Mbps service available to them, followed by Maryland (89%), Utah (87%) and Illinois (85%).

The Senate Commerce Committee unanimously passed the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act (S.1822), a bill that would try to improve the data the government uses to establish where broadband is and isn't via broadband availability maps. Specifically, the bill:

Some key findings about the state of the news media in 2018:

Many Americans see declining levels of trust in the country, whether it is their confidence in the federal government and elected officials or their trust of each other, a new Pew Research Center report finds. And most believe that the interplay between the trust issues in the public and the interpersonal sphere has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems. 

Based on the way older technology was rolled out, waiting for organic rates of adoption to close that digital divide is not an option. Especially when the physical infrastructure required to support wires is concerned. The reasons for slow rates of wire-based take-up are numerous and include lower population densities and greater distances between dwellings. Microsoft believes closing today’s digital divide is a priority and that failing to do so risks leaving behind millions of people.

A new PCMag 1study once again highlights how community-run internet service providers (ISPs) offer better, faster broadband than their private sector counterparts. All told, six of the ten fastest ISPs were either directly run by a local community, or involved some form of partnership between the public and private sectors.

While broadband availability in the United States continues to expand, people living in rural areas remain among the least likely to have broadband access. Mississippi, for example, is ranked 46 in broadband access and 47 in terms of urban population. The lack of broadband access and usage places rural areas across the nation at a disadvantage for a variety of reasons including economic growth, healthcare, and education. However, cost-to-serve is the primary challenge associated with bringing broadband to rural areas.

Around the country, local governments are grappling with the challenge of getting quality broadband access to their citizens, but without data about what speeds customers are actually experiencing, making effective policy becomes impossible. Internet speed tests can help inform those policies, and while there are several tests available to users, they are not all the same.

In an effort to expand the use of telecommunications services by low-income Americans, the Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline program offers subsidies to qualifying low-income households. In recent years, the program has undergone significant reform and more modifications have been proposed.

On July 11, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai released a draft proposal to improve the FCC’s broadband-deployment data-collection rules. These revisions are intended to increase the granularity and precision of the National Broadband Map, a semiannual data-collection effort that began at the National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) in 2010. The full FCC will vote on Chairman Pai’s proposal at its Aug.