Research

While broadband is widely believed to augment productivity, there is little firm-level evidence of a generalised causal effect. In this paper we examine whether the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband services increased firms' productivity in nine sub-sectors within the services and distribution sector in Ireland from 2006 to 2012. Firm-level panel data on firms' characteristics are linked to spatial information on the rollout of DSL.

In 2016, Free Press released Digital Denied, which showed that disparities in broadband adoption — commonly known as the digital divide —stem not only from income inequality, but from systemic racial discrimination. The report found that nearly half of all people in the country without home-internet access were people of color. Much of that gap was indeed the result of income inequality.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) and the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB) released updated data on fixed broadband deployment and mobile voice and broadband deployment as of December 31, 2017. These data were collected through FCC Form 477 and are available on the FCC's website.

This paper explores the connection between corporate social responsibility and social media safety. By examining the legal framework governing social platforms in the United States and case studies of online harms, we explore whether current US laws and company content moderation policies are effective in eliminating content (revenge porn and acts of terrorism) that is universally agreed to be harmful. Finally, the paper makes a number of suggestions for improvements in policy.

The Fiber Broadband Association and RVA, LLC released a new report on the rapid growth of the North American fiber broadband industry. Key findings include:

More than a quarter of UK homes do not have fast enough broadband to cope with a typical family’s internet needs. Just over 26% of the UK’s estimated 28 million households are getting by on speeds of less than 10Mbps, the level the media regulator, Ofcom, says is the bare minimum requirement for a modern household. “This research lays bare the extent of the UK’s digital divide,” said Dani Warner, a broadband expert at uSwitch. “Streets that are relatively close geographically can be light years apart when it comes to the download speeds they are getting.”

America continues to make significant strides in reducing the digital divide among school-age children. In 2017, 14 percent of the US population between ages 6 and 17 lived in homes with no Internet service, down from 19 percent in 2015. Still, significant challenges remain, especially for the approximately 7 million school-age children that lived in households without home Internet service in 2017.

A series of interactive maps to visualize home internet access, covering more than 65,000 occupied Census tracts in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. On the base maps, NDIA calculated and mapped two crucial data points from census data: 1) What percentage of households in each Census tract had no home internet access at all in 2017 — not even mobile internet or dial-up connections?  2) What percentage of households in each Census tract had “Broadband such as cable, fiber optic or DSL” in 2017?

Social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans: One-in-five US adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers.

Since 2011, the National Broadband Map has been a vital tool for consumers, businesses, policy makers, and researchers by providing an easy- to-use and searchable way to find out who is offering broadband, what types of broadband they are offering, and where they are offering it.  But the mapping platform has become dated, as has the coverage data, which was collected through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) State Broadband Initiative (SBI); the last published SBI data set was current as of June 30, 2014.  Based on the age of the data, and the underlyi