Research

As the City of South Bend’s Civic Innovation team works to better connect residents in our community, we need to first understand residents’ current experiences across connectivity options.

ABI Research’s latest report on the state of the fixed wireless access (FWA) market forecasts that 5G FWA subscriptions will reach 72 million by 2027, representing 35% of the total FWA market five years from now. LTE FWA services are already widely deployed worldwide, but they often can’t provide the speeds required to compete with wired broadband connections.

This white paper provides an overview of current and potential new mid-band and extended mid-band spectrum availability in the United States over the next several years, including technical characteristics and challenges, as well as policy and regulatory landscape. The realization of new bands in these spectrum ranges depends on several developments, including studies and solutions for coexistence with incumbent services. There are currently no bands in the spectrum pipeline in the US.

Half of all households eligible to participate in the Affordable Connectivity Program are unaware of the benefit. That's too many households. A January 2023 survey of low-income households found that 37 percent of eligible households that knew little about ACP said they would be likely to apply with more information and 31 percent said they would be likely to apply if they knew whether they qualified.

In November 2022, the Federal Communications Commission released new broadband maps that provide a snapshot of the state of broadband deployment in the United States. Here are some key developments and things the FCC learned over the past four months.

In this report, the Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau analyzes how the Connected Care Pilot Program and the COVID-19 Telehealth Program impacted healthcare providers’ use of telehealth services. Telehealth took on an increasingly critical role in healthcare delivery during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

The study proposes an economic growth econometric model that accounts for the role of fixed broadband in mitigating the economic losses resulting from COVID-19. Results show that had the national fixed broadband penetration been the same as that of the most-connected state (Delaware, 91.4%) rather than the actual level of 70.5%1 , the national GDP contraction in 2020 would have been 1% rather than the actual 2.2%. The analysis also indicates that those states with higher adoption of fixed broadband infrastructure were able to mitigate a larger portion of their 2020 economic losses due to pa

The Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA) recently published perhaps the most definitive look at the wireless infrastructure landscape in the US, showing 142,100 cell towers and 452,200 outdoor small cell nodes across the country at the end of 2022. Because WIA's report segments infrastructure by type, it offers a clearer picture of the 5G marketplace than recent findings from CTIA, the primary trade association for the US wireless industry. CTIA counted a total of 419,000 cell sites across the US at the end of 2021.

Cable companies’ wireless offerings are a bigger threat to wireless providers than wireless providers’ broadband offerings are to cable companies, according to a new research note from industry financial analysts at SVB MoffettNathanson. It’s a contrarian view at a time when fixed wireless offerings from T-Mobile and Verizon are stealing cable broadband subscribers and the mobile market is heavily saturated. The researchers base their analysis on several key market realities. One of the most critical is that the wireless industry is roughly twice the size of the broadband industry.

Two things are clear in an internet satisfaction report commissioned by Amdocs and conducted by researchers at Dynata: Broadband generally is working well and many see it as a necessity. The survey found that 89% of respondents said they have reliable access and that the number of homes with more than nine connected devices has almost doubled since 2021. Only 13% of homes with annual incomes of less than $50,000 per year (low-income) have more than nine connected devices.