Digital Divide

How should broadband adoption, affordability, and equity impact the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s assessment of the availability of broadband for all Americans? A review of recent research indicates that it is not enough for networks to meet just certain deployment benchmarks. Consumer behavior is part of the picture: We cannot reach our universal broadband goals without widespread adoption, and we cannot achieve universal broadband adoption if service is not affordable.

Wherever you’re at in your AI journey, it’s time for a digital inclusion community discussion. What we know for sure is that AI will cause another digital divide, or further exacerbate the one we already have. To jump-start the discussion, I have some overarching thoughts about AI and digital inclusion: 

The holidays are all about trying to spend time with family—a hard thing to do when a family member is behind bars. And it's even harder if that person is held in a local jail, where there's been a growing trend away from in-person visits. "There's no more eye-to-eye, face-to-face visitation," says Maj. David McFadyen, the head of administrative operations for the sheriff's office in North Carolina's Craven County. Since the pandemic, the county jail has switched to a remote video system for family visits. It's not free; families pay the video service contractor $8 per 20 minutes. But Maj.

To gain insight into the current performance of networks, we analyzed Speedtest® data in Q3 2023. Our analysis compares changes in 5G performance to the previous year, identifies the top 10 countries with the best performance, and discusses customer satisfaction with 5G. We also ranked countries based on the performance of their fixed networks and investigated the connectivity gap across the world. Key takeways:

This report presents the main findings from the 2023 Statewide Survey on Broadband Adoption Survey.

Digital Inclusion Coalitions provide the unique service of developing their communities’ digital inclusion ecosystems. Coalitions advance digital equity by providing collective empowerment, alignment, coordination, and amplification of member organizations’ digital inclusion efforts. To maximize the coalition’s ability to support digital equity, coalitions should:

I’m currently enrolled in one of the first bachelor’s degree programs inside California prisons. The program is offered by California State University, Los Angeles, and the laptop is one of its perks. The students in my cohort—the program’s third, but the first to receive personal laptops—were all incarcerated at very young ages and sentenced to prison terms that reflect football scores. I’ve served 17 years of a 50-year-to-life sentence, and none of us foresaw living past our 18th birthdays, let alone attending university.

Since around 2016, telecommunications companies like ViaPath and Securus (which owns JPay) have issued thousands of tablets in prisons and jails nationwide. These devices are populated with prison-approved content and can’t connect to the internet unless they are hacked and updated with software, a process otherwise known as jailbreaking, or rooting. Jailbreaking a tablet can cost up to $300, and the reasons for doing it vary.

One of the most interesting rules in the BEAD Program is that broadband needs to be offered to every unserved location in the country—not 98 percent, not 99 percent, but all of them. This sounds like a terrific policy goal, but as I’ve been thinking about it, the goal is going to be incredibly hard to meet in many places. There are homes throughout the West that are far away from everybody else and will be extremely expensive to reach. There might be even more such homes in Alaska.

Mayor Brandon Scott (D-Baltimore) announced FreeBmoreWiFi, a free, public WiFi network in the City of Baltimore, which will be implemented by the Office of Broadband and Digital Equity and funded by American Rescue Plan Act funds. The first locations that will be getting this free WiFi are Middle Branch Fitness and Wellness and the Solo Gibbs Recreation Center. The City aims to have the network up at all of Baltimore City's recreation centers by the end of 2024, with future expansion expected. "FreeBmoreWiFi is about more than internet access," says Baltimore City IT Director Todd Carter.