Roughly 3 billion citizens remain offline, equating to approximately 40 percent of the global population. Therefore, providing Internet connectivity is an essential part of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 9). In this paper, a high-resolution global model is developed to evaluate the necessary investment requirements to achieve affordable universal broadband. The results indicate that approximately $418 billion needs to be mobilized to connect all unconnected citizens globally (targeting 40–50 GB/Month per user with 95 percent reliability). The bulk of additional investment is for emerging market economies (73 percent) and low-income developing countries (24 percent). Tthe paper contributes a high-resolution global assessment that quantifies universal broadband investment at the sub-national level to achieve SDG Goal 9.

One of the provisions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is that it requires the Federal Communications Commission to “take steps to ensure that all people of the United States benefit from equal access to broadband internet access within the service area of a provider of such service.” In legalese, the term equal access, in this case, means that consumers should be able to expect to get the same speed, capacity, and latency as other customers buying the same product from the same internet service provider (ISP) sold elsewhere. This new mandate has been labeled as a prohibition against digital discrimination. In November 2023, The FCC will issue its rules to eliminate digital discrimination. The agency will deliver its digital discrimination policy to Congress and then act on the defined principle in the future. At a minimum, I would bet that ISPs are going to have to periodically certify to the FCC that they don’t discriminate. Beyond that, the agency is going to have to define the process by which it will identify discrimination and take action to remedy violations of the principle.

President Biden was joined by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra as they announced new efforts to crack down on junk fees and bring down costs for American consumers. Junk fees are hidden, surprise fees that companies sneak onto customer bills, increasing costs and stifling competition in industries across the economy. In 2022, President Biden called on federal agencies, Congress, and private companies to crack down on junk fees and provide consumers with the full price upfront. The FTC is proposing a rule that, if finalized as proposed, would ban businesses from charging hidden and misleading fees and require them to show the full price up front. The CFPB is taking action to require large banks and credit unions to provide basic information to consumers without charging fees—meaning no more fees for basic services like checking bank account balances, obtaining a payoff amount for a loan, or getting account information needed for applications. These announcements build on important actions the Biden-Harris Administration has already taken to address junk fees, which can be viewed in full here.

AT&T CEO John Stankey spoke at a Semafor event on October 10 to discuss barriers to greater adoption of broadband in the US, and the conversation ended up focusing heavily on spectrum. “You want more competition and resiliency in broadband in the United States, you need deep spectrum,” he said. “The United States is not in an enviable position right now for the next 10 years relative to some other developed nations.” He then proceeded to touch on a lot of hot buttons in the wireless industry. He noted that the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t even have its authority to auction spectrum right now. “We have an FCC which actually can’t run an auction, which is kind of unfathomable,” he said. “We first have to get back to a point where we have an agency that can auction spectrum or license some spectrum to put it into use.” His reference to the FCC’s ability to “license some spectrum to put it into use” was probably referring to the fact that T-Mobile purchased $304 million worth of 2.5 GHz spectrum in Auction 108 last summer. But because of the FCC’s lapse in auction authority, the agency has not been able to process those licenses so that T-Mobile can deploy the spectrum in its network.

The 2023 Broadband Pricing Index (BPI), the fourth installment of USTelecom’s annual report, shows continued good news for broadband consumers, including an 18 percent drop year-over-year in the price of providers’ most popular broadband speed tier (Real BPI-Consumer Choice) and a 6.5 percent drop year-over-year in the price of providers’ fastest speed tier (Real BPI-Speed). Even without accounting for inflation, this pricing trend is in direct contrast to the rising cost of overall goods and services, up nearly 5 percent in a similar one-year period. The new data builds on consistent trends over the past eight years, showing prices for both the most popular and fastest tiers, when accounting for inflation, down by 55 percent since 2015. Over the same period, download speeds for the most popular service offerings got significantly faster, accelerating by more than 140 percent, and download speeds for the fastest service offerings were up 117 percent. The combination of faster speeds and lower prices has translated into an approximately 80 percent reduction over the past eight years in the real price per megabit for the most popular and fastest service offerings – allowing many consumers to do far more with their broadband service than ever before. More findings from the 2023 BPI can be found here.