Research

Mid-band spectrum is the key to unlocking the benefits of 5G for American consumers, enterprises, and innovators. This spectrum constitutes a sweet spot, delivering a balance of coverage and deep capacity essential to 5G services. Certain technical aspects of this spectrum are essential for mobile operators to leverage these bands to unleash the full power of 5G and to ensure dependable, high-performance service. These include exclusive licensing, wide spectrum bands of hundreds of megahertz, and full-power radio base stations.

Our recommendations for addressing the three prongs of digital inequity – connectivity, device ownership, and access to training – will require a community-led “all hands on deck” approach. Each recommendation will require commitment from the public sector – including the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and/or the federal government – as well as our city’s private sector and broader civic community. Community anchor institutions – both government institutions like CPS and Chicago Public Library (CPL) – as well as community-based nonprofits, will play a critical role.

This report is a culmination of three years of investigation into domestic terrorism and the federal response. This report focuses on the rise in domestic terrorism, the federal response, the allocation of federal resources to addressing domestic terrorism, and the role of social media companies in the proliferation of extremist content. The expansion of social media has led to increased recruitment, dissemination, and coordination of domestic terrorist and extremist related activities.

Broadband service is too expensive for many Americans to afford. Consumer Reports ollected and analyzed more than 22,000 consumer broadband bills.

Society has long fretted about technology’s impact on youth. The hyperconnected nature of social media has led to new anxieties, including worries that these platforms may be negatively impacting teenagers’ mental health. Despite these concerns, teens themselves paint a more nuanced picture of adolescent life on social media.

The findings from the three Communications Equity and Diversity Council working groups offer guidance to states and localities seeking to prohibit “digital discrimination” in broadband deployment, adoption, and use, as well as in the contracting and grants processes for funds related to forthcoming broadband infrastructure.

The Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 7951) would expand telework training for managers, require agencies to develop goals for telework participation, and collect data on productivity and cost savings from teleworking. The bill would require the Office of Personnel Management to publish guidance to assist agencies in performing those activities and to improve the reliability of telework data collected by the agency. CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 7951 would have an insignificant effect on direct spending and no effect on revenues over the 2023-2032 period.

This report, mandated by the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2021, details the work of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives (OMBI) in expanding access and identifying barriers to high-speed internet service for students, faculty, and staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBU), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCU), and Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) and within anchor communities. Examples of OMBI’s key 2021-2022 accomplishments highlighted in the report include:

If you’re frustrated with the speed of your home Internet, what can you do to improve it? Before making the leap to a new provider or absorbing the often difficult-to-swallow costs of a high-speed service plan, you might want to consider another culprit of slow Internet: your WiFi connection. WiFi connection performance is determined by factors independent of your access connection, while the access connection performance is (primarily) determined by the specific service contract you purchase from a service provider (ISP).

Virginia has made significant strides to curtail the many facets of the digital divide that exist throughout the Commonwealth. As part of the Virginia Funders Network’s (VFN) efforts to support the Commonwealth’s commitment to achieving universal connectivity by 2024, this memo recommends several steps that funders can perform "now:"