Data & Mapping

With great drama, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 became law on December 27, 2021. The $2.3 trillion COVID relief and government spending bill extended unemployment benefits and ensured the government can keep running. The $900 billion COVID relief provision includes over $7 billion to help improve connectivity in the U.S.

In October 2019, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society issued Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s. The agenda was comprehensive, constructed upon achievements in communities and insights from experts across the nation. The report outlined the key building blocks of broadband policy—deployment, competition, community anchor institutions, and digital equity (including affordability and adoption).

As societies and economies continue to digitize, the need to understand the digital divide beyond binary availability or adoption metrics is increasing. Understanding the quality and performance of home internet—measured by internet speeds—among different socioeconomic groups contributes to the complex digital equity landscape at a time when all U.S. states and territories are completing digital equity plans.

High-speed broadband internet access is a critically important issue for many aspects of daily life, yet populations in rural areas are often unserved or underserved with reliable internet connectivity. Expanding broadband internet coverage in rural areas may have significant economic potential, especially since it enables precision farming which in turn increases yields, particularly for row crops such as corn and soybeans.

In response to claims that Mercury Broadband has overstated its ability to provide fixed wireless access (FWA) in 12 Michigan counties on the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadband map, the company has released its own map of coverage in the counties in question. Mercury said it uses Forsk’s Atoll software for its mapping. The company stated in an email, “Mercury does not intentionally overstate speeds or coverage.

The Utah Broadband Center (UBC), part of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, is launching the Utah Broadband Availability Challenge Process to finalize identifying broadband serviceable locations in Utah without access to reliable high-speed internet infrastructure.

In 2021, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program allocated $42.45 billion to enhance high-speed internet access across the United States. As part of this funding initiative, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) developed a national coverage map to guide the allocation of BEAD funds. This map was the key determinant to direct BEAD investments to areas in need of broadband infrastructure improvements.

We all have eclipse on the brain, so I thought it’d be fun to look at some eclipse broadband stats. In the path of totality, 8% of locations are either unserved or underserved according to the NTIA definition of reliable broadband. That’s just over 1 million locations out of 11.9 million locations in the path of totality in total. If the path of totality were a state, it would be ranked 19th in terms of access to broadband. It’s also interesting to think about the competition situation in the path of totality.

In 2020, we manually checked availability of more than 11,000 addresses using Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Form 477 data as the “source of truth.” Based on the results, we estimated that as many as 42 million Americans did not have the ability to purchase broadband internet at the time. Since then, quite a bit has changed.

The state of Maryland has created a useful online dashboard showing how much broadband funding it awarded between 2019 and 2023. Interested parties can check information by provider and by year. A total of 20 entities received grants during the five years covered by the dashboard, which was posted by the Maryland Office of Statewide Broadband. The 10 companies that were awarded the most money were