Research

The largest cable and wireline phone providers in the US – representing about 96% of the residential broadband internet access service market – acquired about 1,020,000 net additional broadband Internet subscribers in 1Q 2021. These top broadband providers now account for about 107 million subscribers, with top cable companies having about 73.7 million broadband subscribers, and top wireline phone companies having about 33.3 million subscribers.

There is an ongoing need to improve broadband data collections with community-level perspectives, affordability metrics, and adoption rates. Inaccurate federal broadband mapping data impacts broadband deployment efforts throughout the United States states and its territories. Using Federal Communications Commission data, state mapping, and submissions from local leaders, this report provides a state-by-state review of broadband access.

Measuring Library Broadband Networks for the National Digital Platform, is a research grant from by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant for Libraries program (award #LG-71-18-0110-18). The research is led by Dr.

This report identifies solutions and best practices to accelerate internet adoption through sponsored-service programs. These recommendations are critical to achieving educational equity and minimizing the risks of the digital divide—including income loss and economic exclusion—for the duration of the pandemic and beyond. As the government pursues additional education and low-income-support programs, the lessons from sponsored-service programs are applicable more broadly.

In 2020, we manually checked availability of more than 11,000 addresses using Federal Communications Commission Form 477 data as the “source of truth.” Based on the results, we estimated that 42 million Americans do not have the ability to purchase broadband internet. In 2021, we expanded our study, manually checking availability of terrestrial broadband internet (wired or fixed wireless) for more than 58,000 addresses. In all, we checked more than 110,000 address-provider combinations using the FCC Form 477 data as the “source of truth”.

Radio and television stations’ local content – particularly news – provides great value for audiences on the major technology platforms. However, broadcasters are not fairly compensated for this valuable content because of the way the markets currently operate. The reason for that is simple – these tech platforms have substantial market power in their provision of services, and they use that power for advancing their own growth and benefit to the detriment of local broadcast journalism.

The facts on pricing and profits for the US broadband industry, the varying ways to measure prices, the important differences between these methods, and how certain methods can be used to obfuscate the reality of what is happening in the market and at the kitchen table. Government and industry data note the strength and weaknesses in each form and highlight how the ISP industry and its apologists use this kind of data to mislead. Some of our findings include:

This report is the product of an extensive investigation by the New York Office of the Attorney General (OAG) of the parties that sought to influence the Federal Communications Commission’s 2017 proceeding to repeal the agency’s net neutrality rules. In the course of that investigation, the OAG obtained and analyzed tens of thousands of internal emails, planning documents, bank records, invoices, and data comprising hundreds of millions of records. Our investigation confirmed many contemporaneous reports of fraud that dogged that rulemaking process.

Quantifying the economic impact of bridging the digital divide clearly shows the criticality of broadband infrastructure to the US economy. Deloitte developed economic models to evaluate the relationship between broadband and economic growth. The models indicate that a 10-percentage-point increase of broadband penetration in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs in 2019, or an average annual increase of 269,000 jobs. Moreover, Deloitte found a strong correlation between broadband availability and jobs and GDP growth.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic began towards the tail end of the first quarter of 2020. The impact was immediate and has forever changed bandwidth usage patterns. As 2020 came to an end, subscribers, on average, were consuming close to one half of a terabyte (TB) of data, up 40% from 2019. The pandemic impact is even more pronounced with the growth in upstream bandwidth. OpenVault predicts that by December 2021, the average broadband consumption per household will be around 600-650 gigabytes -- that's more than six times the average broadband consumption level since 2015.