Research

The fiber rollout may be slow and concentrated in urban areas, but it’s customers’ preferred choice when available. Fiber internet service providers (ISPs) outshine non-fiber ISPs 76 to 68 (out of 100) for customer satisfaction, per the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Telecommunications Study 2024.

On May 2, 2024, New Street Research Policy Advisor and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Blair Levin testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband at a hearing entitled The Future of Broadband Affordability.

Recent research found that as the share of White non-Hispanics increases, average download and upload speeds decreases. To delve deeper into this finding and better understand the factors affecting internet speeds, this research conducted spatial error regression models looking at different groups across two points in time (2019 and 2022). Results indicate that rural, older, and poorer groups continue to be associated with slower speeds and that by 2022, these relationships became stronger, widening the divide.

In 2019, the Vermont Department of Public Service found that nearly a quarter of Vermont addresses lacked service that met the then federal benchmarks for broadband speeds (25/3 megabits per second, or Mbps). The COVID-19 pandemic only underscored the urgent need in a state that has consistently ranked near the bottom of connectivity comparisons over the past decade. Vermonters saw a lack of interest from private providers to invest in the sparsely populated rural state and recognized that communities needed to address the problem themselves.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives (OMBI) has released its Annual Report for 2023.

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics released data related to the price, subscription rates, and plan characteristics of the internet service offerings of participating providers in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), as required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  These data were collected through the ACP Transparency Data Collection and are available for download on the FCC’s website at https://www.fcc.gov/affordable-connectivity-program.

Can you imagine a future where everyone relies solely on their cellular connection, and they don’t subscribe to a fixed broadband connection at all? Currently, the U.S. government is undertaking a big push to get everyone in the country connected to fiber broadband to close the digital divide. But ironically, a research group from the U.K.

On behalf of Free Press, the African American Research Collaborative (AARC) and BSP Research (BSP) completed a survey of 3,000 American adults to better understand how Americans use media and technology to gain information, how they deal with misinformation and safety online, what privacy concerns they have about online platforms, what they believe are appropriate roles in content moderation, and whether they perceive a need for more independent news sources in the current media and political environment. Key findings included:

Through the Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives (OMBI), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) directly addresses the lack of high-speed Internet access, connectivity, adoption, and equity at our nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). OMBI works through these anchor institutions to impact their surrounding anchor communities.

Developing a common and comprehensive factual understanding about how we use, need, and could potentially expand access to spectrum is critical to meet the Nation’s diverse spectrum requirements while also maintaining trust in the process.  It’s core to the National Spectrum Strategy's study-first approach to building a spectrum pipeline. For the Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) demonstration, the Department of Defense relaunched Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions (PATHSS) to engage key stakeholders.