Research

Many Americans say the creation and spread of made-up news and information is causing significant harm to the nation and needs to be stopped. Indeed, more Americans view made-up news as a very big problem for the country than identify terrorism, illegal immigration, racism and sexism that way.

We examine the effects of broadband speed on county unemployment rates in Tennessee. We merge the older National Broadband  Map dataset and the newer Federal Communications Commission dataset in lengthening our broadband access data over the period 2011-2015. Extending the dataset improves the precision of the estimates. Our panel regressions control for potential selection bias and reverse causality and show that broadband speed matters: unemployment rates are about 0.26 percentage points lower in counties with high speeds compared to counties with low speeds.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is announcing a new searchable database of 50 federal broadband programs, spanning a dozen federal agencies with billions of dollars for broadband grants, loans and other resources. The database, created with help of participating federal agencies, fulfills a goal set out in the American Broadband Initiative announced in February to make it easier for community leaders to find federal funding and permitting information.

Rural Americans have made large gains in adopting digital technology over the past decade, but they generally remain less likely than urban or suburban adults to have home broadband or own a smartphone.

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.