Research

Throughout lawmakers’ partisan wrangling to iron out the details of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the popularity of major provisions held strong among voters according to new polling from Morning Consult and Politico. All of the six potential investments included in the survey received over 50 percent support from voters of all parties.

Federal agencies are competing with one another over radio waves used to help predict changes in the climate as the sky is increasingly cluttered with noise from billions of smartphones. On one side are NOAA and NASA. They have developed space satellites that passively capture and decode the faint energy signals given off by changes in water vapor, temperatures, rain and wind that determine future weather patterns.

Consumer Reports conducted a nationally representative survey to assess Americans’ access to high-speed internet service, and gauge their experiences and satisfaction with their broadband internet service. Key findings of the survey include: 

Lumen Technologies is worsening the digital divide and failing its customers and workers by not investing adequately in the essential fiber-optic buildout that is the standard for broadband networks worldwide.

A study conducted by the Reviews.com Broadband Research Team about municipal broadband found a growing number of US residents are excited about the prospect of internet service as a utility. As interest in public broadband increases, it will be interesting to follow along with potential increases in pressure placed on local politicians to push for public internet. The study found:

With data from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, we estimate the effect of a large-scale, government-owned broadband network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on labor market outcomes. Difference-in-Differences, augmented with Coarsened Exact Matching, is used to estimate the causal effect of the network across nine labor market outcomes. We find no economically- nor statistically-significant effect on the labor market from the city's broadband investments.

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet access quality, exploiting data from the new Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Moving to high-quality, fully reliable home internet service for all Americans (“universal access”) would raise earnings-weighted labor productivity by an estimated 1.1 percent in the coming years.

The World Data Lab (WDL) has developed a global measurement framework of internet poverty to measure the number of people left behind in the internet revolution. People who can’t afford a basic package of connectivity—set at 1.5 gigabytes per month at a minimum download speed of 3 megabits per second (equivalent to 6 seconds to load a standard web page)—are internet-poor. WDL estimates that there are around 1.1 billion people living in internet poverty today.

5G is considered a key technology for society, but its implementation is surrounded by controversy. Beyond its technical aspects, 5G has become a question of security and national interest for many EU Member States as well as an international policy issue. Technological autonomy and digital sovereignty are increasingly recognized as strategic priorities on a global scale, yet the EU's position is unique for two reasons. On one hand, the EU has unintentionally become part of the playing field in the US-China dispute over technology companies and 5G.