Research

This Opensignal looks at data from Jan-March 2019, the timeframe just prior to the first 5G services launching in South Korea and the US. We examined 87 countries and compared their performance across all five of our key award metrics: 4G Availability, Video Experience, Download and Upload Speed Experience, and Latency Experience. Key Findings:

Opensignal has benchmarked the experience smartphone users receive in every US state and the fifty largest cities immediately prior to 5G’s launch so it’s easy to see to what extent 5G offers an improvement. In the last year, the download speeds experienced by smartphone users in the US have improved little, rising from 17 megabits per second (Mbps) to 21.3 Mbps between the first quarter of 2018 and the same period in 2019. There’s lots of room for improvement but only a new technology like 5G is likely to lead to a step-change improvement in the mobile network experience. Key findings:

On May 29, 2019, the Federal Communications Commission released the 2019 Broadband Deployment Report. For the second consecutive year, the FCC concluded that broadband is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires the FCC to report annually on the availability of advanced telecommunications capability (broadband) to all Americans and to determine if broadband services are being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.

Early data from USTelecom’s broadband mapping pilot in Missouri and Virginia indicates the new methodology is working and is “superior to other [mapping] proposals,” the lobbying group tells the Federal Communications Commission. The broadband map pilot is an effort aimed at better defining where there are gaps in rural broadband coverage.

The Presidential Memorandum of October 25, 2018, “Developing a Sustainable Spectrum Strategy for America’s Future,” calls for the development of a National Spectrum Strategy. The development of the strategy is to be informed by three interim products, one of which is a report on emerging technologies and their expected impact on non-Federal spectrum demand, to be submitted to the President by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) or the Director’s designee. The purpose of this paper is to assist OSTP in developing the required report.

This report on recommendations for national spectrum research and development (R&D) priorities sets a vision to improve the national economic impact of electromagnetic spectrum for an increasingly wide range of communications, networking, location, and other applications while preserving and protecting national security and public safety. This priorities report is one step in defining an overall approach to position the United States as a world leader in next-generation spectrum technologies that more effectively leverage time, frequency, space, code, waveform, and networks.

Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers’ online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years.

Here's the reaction to the FCC's 2019 Broadband Deployment Report.

The first statistical evidence on the effects on labor market outcomes of municipal broadband systems. Using data obtained from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, we apply the Difference-in-Differences estimator, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching and the wild bootstrap, to quantify the economic impact, if any, of the county-wide government-owned network (“GON”) in Chattanooga (TN) on labor market outcomes. Across a variety of empirical models, we find no payoffs in the labor market from the city’s broadband investments.

To be clear: according to our data collection, which has been rightfully criticized, approximately nine million Americans still lack access to even 10/1 Mbps service, and our finding here does not deny that point. However, our statutory mandate is not only to determine whether all Americans currently have access to advanced telecommunications capabilities, but also whether progress in deploying such services is proceeding at a reasonable and timely pace, and an affirmative response to the latter inquiry is completely consistent with the facts on the ground.