Category Archives: Research

USTelecom 2025 Pricing Index shows lower costs and higher speeds for broadband

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USTelecom, an industry association, published their 2025 Pricing Index (Lower Bills, Faster Speeds: Family Budgets Get a Boost as Broadband Prices Decline )…

This sixth edition of USTelecom’s Broadband
Pricing Index (BPI) shows U.S. broadband services
have continued a long-running trend of pairing
faster speeds with lower bills. These price declines
stand in sharp contrast to overall U.S. inflation
(CPI-U), which stood at 2.4% from March 2024 to
March 2025.
The continued progress of broadband affordability
and quality over the past year adds to a 10
year record of soaring consumer value. Indeed,
broadband prices for today’s most popular services
(100-940 Mbps) have declined by 43.1% over the
past 10 years, while the cost of overall consumer
goods and services has risen by 35.8%.
As network investment and fiber deployment
continue at near-record levels—$89.6 billion last year alone —U.S. consumers have the powerful dual advantage
of some of the world’s most advanced and increasingly affordable high-speed connections. This connectivity is
foundational so that more Americans can participate in our modern digital economy—from accessing medical
specialists, remote work and educational opportunities to realizing the promise of AI and quantum networks.

MN Office of Broadband Development Performance Report for 2025

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Being honest, I’m not sure when the MN Office of Broadband Development Performance Report for 2025 came out, but it seems to cover what’s been budgeted as well as what’s been spent. Here’s the purpose form the report itself…

This report details the State of Minnesota’s use of its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Capital Projects Fund (CPF) allocation. The State’s goal with the CPF investment is to expand broadband infrastructure to unserved and underserved communities through three broadband infrastructure grant programs and one community facilities grant program. The Minnesota Office of Broadband Development (OBD) administers the broadband infrastructure programs, and the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) administers the Community Facilities program.

And key findings…

Key Outcomes and Opportunities Broadband projects that have been administered utilizing CPF dollars are expected to reach a total of 31,732 passings across the state.

In the dates covered by this report, OBD has processed reimbursements and administered project costs of $29,020,361.20 in grants through B2B, $19,055,545.37 in grants through LD, and $3,244,240.68 through LE. COMPLETION STATUS ACROSS 94 OBD PROJECTS Completed Projects More than 50% complete Less than 50% complete Not started 1 project 11 projects OBD rolled out the third round of Line Extension, which awarded $7,554,872.31 to 16 providers and will serve 1,087 previously unserved locations in Minnesota. OBD plans to use funds from earlier rounds of B2B, LD, and LE projects, that completed under budget to re-roll out a fourth round of Line Extension Fall 2025. See Budget Modification for details.

Key outcomes across the state with broadband projects include:
• Most recent mapping data from December 2024 (Minnesota’s State Program Dashboard) shows the state of Minnesota is overall, 90.32% served (with speeds of at least 100 by 20 Mbps), 7.33% unserved, and 2.36% underserved for wireline service.
• Local partners matched in funding CPF Line Extension Rounds 1 through 3 a total of $5,069,552.87
• Combined total local matching funds for all CPF projects is projected around $151 million

As well as use of funds

OBD Programs
The following table captures the expenditures for the reporting period. CPF dollars have been spent on
administrative costs, which include contracting with grantees, compiling progress reports, monitoring
site visits, compiling progress reports, federal reporting and on-site field validations, as well as infrastructure project costs. Of the total CPF dollars allocated to the state in the amount of $180,702,620.00, OBD has reported total expenditures through FY 2025 of $69,475,144.63 or about 38% of state funds.
FY25 Minnesota Office of Broadband Development CPF funding

Budget Modification
OBD requested and gained approval of a net zero budget modification, increasing the LD and LE budgets, and decreasing the B2B budget to cover the following cumulative budget changes of $1,287,927.00.

The budget modifications were completed to align grant balances with legislative directive and to adjust project funding from the original budget. The modification reflected the opportunity OBD saw in the higher demand for LD and LE, via interest and higher applications, from unserved Minnesotan residents and businesses.
As B2B, LD and LE grants close with unspent funds, OBD plans to regrant out LE funding and will complete budget modifications for any B2B and LD with remaining balances, moving the funding over to the LE program. OBD plans to open a Round 4 LE in the fall of 2025 to utilize these funds prior to 12/31/2026 use of funds deadline.

Border-to-Border Broadband Development Grant Program (B2B) and Lower Population Density Pilot (LD) Program
The Border-to-Border Broadband Development Grant Program was created in Minn. Stat. 116J.395 in 2014. The legislative focus of this grant program is to provide financial resources that help make the business case for new and existing providers to invest in building broadband infrastructure into unserved and underserved areas of the state. The Border-to-Border Broadband Grant Program has been funded with state general fund revenues and a combination of both state general fund revenues and federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Sec. 604 Capital Projects Funds (CPF).

Round 7 B2B: Among the active projects: 2 grants are 65%-75% complete, 19 grants are 80% to 99% complete and 4 grants are 100% complete. There are 19 field validations that will occur by fall 2025.
Reimbursements to grantees for FY25 were $29,020,361.20, bringing the reimbursement total to 43.4%
of the total $66,901,598.00 obligated funds.
Round 8, B2B and LD: Among the active B2B projects: one grant is 1% complete, one grant is 70% complete, and one grant is 83% complete. Of the active LD grants, one grant is at 25% complete, one grant is 60% complete, 3 grants are 75-83% complete, and 2 grants are at 90% complete. Many of these will be ready for field validations in the fall 2025. Reimbursements to grantees for FY25 were
$19,055,545.37, bringing the reimbursement total to around 42.9% of the total $44,453,612.00 obligated funds.

Broadband Line Extension (LE) Connection Program
In the 2022 Legislative Session, the Minnesota OBD was directed to create a new program, the Broadband Line Extension Connection Program. The purpose of the program is to award grants for the extension of existing broadband infrastructure to unserved locations. An unserved location is a location that does not have a wired broadband service of at least 25Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. See Appendix B for the summary table of LE projects and below for a status summary.

Round 1 (LE): Construction is complete for all 19 projects. Completion was due by December of 2024. As of 6/30/2025, 17 grants are closed, and 2 grants are pending close. Reimbursements to grantees for FY25 were $2,282,165.48; bringing the reimbursement total to 70.5% of the total $3,238,849.14 obligated funds.
Round 2 (LE): Construction is completed on all 13 projects. Completion was due by June of 2025. As of
6/30/2025, 5 grants are closed, and 8 grants are pending close. Reimbursements to grantees for FY25 were $962,075.20; bringing the reimbursement total to 21.7% of the total $4,430,273.51 obligated funds.
Round 3 (LE): Construction for all 16 projects is to be completed by December 2025; As of 6/30/2025, 7 grants are under 50% completed and 9 are over 50% completed, with 4 of those grants pending close.
No reimbursements have been made to these grantees as of 6/30/2025.

Research show that seniors are least apt to use telehealth as assisted living residents followed by nursing home

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McKnight Senior Living reports…

Residents of assisted living communities and nursing homes have significantly lower odds of using telehealth compared with older adults who use long-term services and supports and live in the community at large, according to a new study. But assisted living residents were more likely to use it than were nursing home residents.

I thought this was interesting because I might have assumed the opposite but…

The study, led by researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Minnesota, shows that although telehealth offers a promising strategy for improving access to care and health outcomes, where an older adult lives will affect their odds of using it. The findings were published Tuesday in a JAMDA – The Journal of the Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medical Association article in press.

Using data from almost 7,000 participants in the 2021-2022 National Core Indicators-Aging and Disabilities Adult Consumer Survey for LTSS, the researchers found that assisted living residents had 20% lower odds of using telehealth, and nursing home residents had 63% lower odds of using it, compared with their community-dwelling counterparts. Nursing home residents had 54% lower odds of using telehealth than did assisted living residents.

The findings, the authors said, highlight a disparity in telehealth access and delivery across various LTSS settings. The lower use in assisted living communities and nursing homes, they said, may reflect differences in infrastructure, staffing and resident autonomy.

Research on Addressing Homelessness Through Equitable Design on TikTok

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The Journal of Community Informatics released a new edition that has a number of broadband-forward or adjacent articles. (I mentioned this edition before.)  There is an interesting article on Addressing Homelessness Through Equitable Design on TikTok. Here’s the abstract…

This study examines the digital experiences of individuals experiencing homelessness on TikTok, focusing on their usage patterns, challenges, and opportunities for social connection. Through a review of literature and analysis of TikTok content, the study examines how individuals experiencing homelessness use social media, the challenges they encounter, and the potential benefits and risks associated with online engagement. Despite challenges such as network access, device quality, and privacy concerns, homeless individuals navigate digital spaces to share personal stories, seek support, and participate in online communities. The study identifies themes related to digital divide perceptions, survival infrastructuring, social capital building, and health information seeking behaviours among homeless populations on TikTok. Based on these insights, the study proposes platform-level and user-level recommendations to improve the digital experiences of homeless individuals on TikTok, focusing on bandwidth-sensitive design, enhanced privacy controls, and security toolkits. These recommendations aim to promote digital inclusion and support for vulnerable populations in the digital age, contributing to ongoing discussions about equity and social support online.

By question was – why TikTok, but they answered that up front…

While previous research has examined how marginalized communities use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, TikTok presents a unique case due to its algorithm-driven content distribution, highly visual nature, and participatory culture. Unlike text-heavy platforms, TikTok’s short-form video format enables individuals to share personal narratives in compelling ways. Its algorithm-driven distribution enables content from marginalized users to achieve visibility far beyond their networks; its video-based format allows creators to share personal narratives even with limited literacy; and its participatory culture supports resource-sharing and solidarity. For unhoused individuals, these affordances may create new opportunities to document lived experiences, seek aid, and contest stigma. At the same time, the same mechanisms also pose heightened risks of exposure and coercion. This duality is especially pressing in Canada, where the Privacy Commissioner’s 2025report noted that despite TikTok being most used social media app by children and teens, it fails to adequately explain its data practices for these vulnerable groups(Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2025). For unhoused individuals, who already face heightened risks of surveillance and coercion, such opacity compounds existing vulnerabilities. With over 14 million users on TikTok and a steadily growing daily user base(Statista, 2022), it becomes pertinent to understand the nature of interaction and user behaviour on the platform—especially when members of vulnerable groups have a different experience on the same. By situating homelessness within the broader literature on digital inequality and community informatics, this study asks how design and policy might better support unhoused individuals engaging with TikTok. Specifically, given the prevalence of smartphone access and social media use as well as the heterogeneous, complex nature of homelessness, this study looks at the existing literature in the domain to answer the following questions:
1. How do individuals experiencing homelessness use social media platforms like TikTok?
2. What are the primary challenges they face in doing so?

Rethinking the smart city as an intelligent archway: research report

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The Journal of Community Informatics released a new edition that has a number of broadband-forward or adjacent articles. (Spoiler, I may post a few article based on the reports in the next week.)  One article (Rethinking the Smart City as an Intelligent City Archway) caught my eye, because I’m in Galway, Ireland for the week and staying very close to tourist location, the Spanish Arch.

Long time readers may remember that I used to spend long periods of time living in Ireland. This time, I’m just here for a couple weeks visiting a daughter. But I’ve always enjoyed comparing technology use in Minnesota to Ireland. I’m learning how tech-dependent Ireland is with digital currency. Cah rarely seems to exchange hands; it’s mostly phone transactions and credit cards. That’s a big change.

Technology has made being a tourist easier. No more asking directions to get to your hotel, Google map is there. Need the train timetable? Google again. Learn more about the art, scan the QR code. On the flip side, not as many stranger-chats in the pub or bus queue as folks are on their phones. This report looks more at how technology makes being a citizen easier…

Urban intelligence is the ability to understand and navigate the physical and digital dimensions of “connected complex urban places”. For example, new infrastructures (e.g., sensors, Internet of Things {IoT} devices like smart lamp posts) are needed to capture and represent places in software platforms and on the Internet. New spatial skills and spatial thinking are needed to navigate these new interfaces and networks of places. This paper aims at understanding urban intelligence by exploring variations in how smart cities have been conceptualized; how citizens have been placed within the smart city; and how Canada’s smart cities initiative has placed on urban (and highly spatial) problems over digital technologies. The metaphor of the Roman arch is used to describe the interdependency of the building blocks of smart cities. Components(building blocks)of the smart city, be they openness, resilience or inclusion, must all be present, and build towards what we argue is the keystone of urban intelligence. We discuss how these components lead to a new consideration of the smart city, the Intelligent City.

The examples are interesting to read, too long to abstract here but the conclusion is helpful to folks who think about community and technology…

In this paper we proposed a model of an intelligent city illustrated by an archway of seven stones. Five stones (smart, open, learning, inclusive and resilient) are structured as a foundation. Another stone (digital citizenship) helps us understand the multiple scales at which the intelligent city functions. Urban intelligence is the keystone, which is reinforced by these stones. Our model is locationally scalable. At the urban (local) scale, the components of the intelligent cities help inhabitants to capitalize on their hybrid physical and digital environment. At the global (earth) scale, the intelligent city is not an isolated transformation of urban areas. Instead we see the archways of the intelligent city and across a long line of municipal transformations from the industrial revolution to a city rooted into the networked society through the connections of digital infrastructures and social relations(Castells 2000). We hope this paper opens a dialogue on what is desired and achievable in the smart city and what constitutes place in a digitally enabled urban space. What is special about the physicality of the smart city and the way we characterize it? How do we ensure that best practice models of the smart city do not emphasize technology alone at the expense of local context and the engagement of local people? What new skills are required tonavigate within the smart city? Implicit in all the stones is the need for spatial thinking and reasoning capabilities as the basis of digital citizenship. Spatiality and smartness share common components, in particular networks and nodes (centres of activity), the importance of topology (relationships), the importance of mobility, and the scalability of activities, knowledge and intelligence. Individual cities and their inhabitants must decide even as they join other cities in a global network of smart cities

Alternative education options are changing the MN learning landscape

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The Dassel Cokato Enterprise Dispatch write about alternative school options in Minnesota, including online learning…

Across Minnesota, a growing number of students are stepping away from traditional public schools and toward alternative education paths — homeschooling,
Post-Secondary Enrollment Options, and online learning. Their reasons range from safety concerns and academic customization to transportation barriers and future career planning. The result is a reshaping of the educational landscape, with public schools facing declining enrollment, funding challenges and a call to evolve.

…

Online learning is also expanding. The State of Education in Minnesota 2025 report by EdAllies notes that while virtual academies offer flexibility, students in rural or low-income households often lack reliable internet or devices, limiting their ability to participate fully.

They dive into the main alterative options…

Each alternative education model—homeschooling, PSEO, and online school—offers distinct advantages and challenges.

Including online learning…

Online schooling offers self-paced learning, access to niche subjects and the convenience of no daily commute. As ConsumerAffairs reports, many students appreciate the autonomy and breadth of course offerings. Still, online learners must contend with technology access issues, reduced rapport with instructors and a heightened risk of isolation or disengagement.

They recognize the requirements of online schooling..

Online learning demands stable internet and devices, which remain out of reach for some rural and urban households. …

Technology access also plays a role. While ISD 466 has invested in Chromebooks, and availability has increased in recent years, broadband access remains inconsistent in some outlying areas. This limits the viability of full-time online learning for students without stable internet at home.

New report: BROADBAND AFFORDABILITY: Assessing the Cost of Broadband for Low-and Moderate Income Communities in Cities

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Here are the key takeaways from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of NY study…

  • This study introduces a new community-level measure of broadband affordability that considers local median monthly household income and costs of living relative to local costs for broadband.
  • Low- and moderate-income communities pay a notably higher share of their income for broadband— 2.43% compared to 0.51% in wealthier areas—exceeding the FCC’s 2% affordability benchmark.
  • In cities where broadband is less affordable, households are more likely to use slower or lower-quality plans due to cost or limited infrastructure. In areas with the least affordable broadband, 26.7% of households rely solely on mobile devices, limiting access to jobs, financial services, and other key resources.
  • Data on broadband pricing is still scarce in small and rural areas, limiting the ability for businesses, government, and community anchor institutions to understand the economic costs and benefits of broadband infrastructure. This underscores the need for localized pricing data to support digital access research.

All very interesting, but I’m always a sucker for an equation to determine a community-level measure of broadband affordability. And this report has that too:

The numerator is the average price for the cheapest internet service plans offered by providers in the geography, and the denominator is the median monthly household income for the geography. This is multiplied by 100 to create a percentage measure of Relative Broadband Affordability experienced by households in a given geography. Relative Broadband Affordability is helpful for understanding the ability of households within a census tract or census place to pay for broadband relative to their median household income. However, to understand just how affordable broadband is to a community, it is important to compare it to other communities within their city.

Turns out affordability impacts the decision to go for mobile-only connection, as the graph below indicates.

One in seven households has no computer at home or relies on a smartphone

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The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society reports on a Digitunity report on home computer ownership…

One in seven households either have no computer at all or rely only on a smartphone for internet access. While smartphones provide convenient internet access and can be more portable and affordable than computers, they lack the functionality of large-screen computers. Access to large-screen computers (think laptops, desktops, and tablets) ensures continuous, on-demand access that a borrowed, shared, or public device doesn’t allow. A large-screen computer enables:

  • Access to learning opportunities and earning educational and workforce credentials.
  • Expanded options for employment, including remote work.
  • Achieving upward economic mobility and long-term financial stability.
  • Participating in community decisions and having their voices heard.
  • Increased connection by being part of their community and reducing social isolation.
  • Improved physical and mental health through access to healthcare and health information.
  • Increased personal agency by finding and using information to make informed decisions about their lives.
  • The article outlines the haves and the have-nots; there are no surprises.

AARP reports show some progress in broadband adoption with seniors but still not in line with younger folks

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Every year, the Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) report from AARP hits closer to home. It’s heartening to see some progress, but these is progress to be made for older folks and digital inclusion…

The 2023 results show some improvement from the ACS survey conducted in 2018, the basis for AARP’s 2020 Aging Connected report.
• The number of older adults who lack wireline broadband access at home has fallen from 22 million in 2018 (42 percent) to 19 million (32 percent) in 2023. The gap is closing, but it has not closed.
• Older adults have seen modest increases in ownership of large-screen computers (desktops and laptops), from 70 percent in 2018 to 73 percent in 2023, with
a slightly larger increase from 60 percent to 67 percent for those over age 75.
• Some states have done better work than others in reducing age-based disparity of wireline access, controlling for other factors. Generally speaking, low-in come older adults in southern states have the lowest wireline and cellular data adoption rates and constitute the population at greatest risk of being disconnected from vital digital services.
• Cellular connectivity, including high-speed 5G services, increased by 17 percent among older adults between 2018 and 2023, providing coverage to 7 million additional older adults.
• Some states that are lagging in wireline broadband access show some of the highest rates of cellular data plan enrollment by seniors, reflecting efforts to close the connectivity gap by whatever means are readily available.
• Policies enacted since 2021, including the American Rescue Plan Act (March 2021) and the Infrastructure Investment and Job Act (November 2021) targeted funds to increasing connectivity nationwide, but inconsistent implementation has yielded patchwork results.

It looks like rural residents have a harder time…

Geography matters: the rural/urban divide. Seventy-nine percent of people in metro areas (calculated based on population, not land area) subscribe to broad band wireline service at home compared with 67 percent for those in non-metro areas. In metro areas, 88 percent of all adults have a cellular data plan compared with 80 percent in rural areas. There are many possible explanations for this, including the lack of infrastructure in less-densely populated areas, the lack of competition among carriers leading to higher prices, the vulnerability of more isolated communities to disruptions and service outages, and the relative availability and increasing quality of cellular or satellite service areas where broadband services are unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

Minnestoa has seen some comparative improvement in the 5 years since first surveys. In 2018, the gaps between broadband adoption by age was pretty extreme:

  • Adoption for 18-64 yrs: 76.6 percent
  • Adoption for 65+: 56 percent
  • Leaving a gap of: 20.6 percent.

That was enough to put Minnesota third for largest gap in 2018. We did not make the “top” list for largest of smallest gap in 2023.

Research shows rural broadband deployment positively affected employment

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A new report (Wired and working? An evaluation of broadband expansion in Rural America) has come out on the impact of CAF on rural communities…

This paper addresses this [rural broadband] gap by evaluating the Connect America Fund (CAF), one of the largest federal broadband programs. CAF provided an unprecedented scale of financial incentives for broadband deployment to companies offering services in unserved or underserved rural areas across the United States. In theory, this support would allow eligible carriers to recover some of their costs and provide services that would otherwise remain unavailable. As a result of CAF, we expect both increased broadband access and expanded economic opportunities enabled by the expanded access. CAF operated until 2020, after which it was replaced by an even larger program: the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. …

Our results suggest that broadband deployment positively affected employment, both in total levels and as a share of the labor force, and increased median household income in the benefited areas. These effects generally strengthened over time, particularly during the pandemic, with earlier-treated areas experiencing the largest gains. Distinctly, we do not find consistent evidence of impacts on self-employment. Our findings offer new insights into how large-scale infrastructure investments can shape local labor markets.

Understanding broadband affordability in context of community, location and income

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The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has an interesting report on broadband affordability…

Existing data on broadband pricing is often limited to aggregate price estimates at the state level or for metropolitan areas. The FCC Urban Rate Survey, an annual survey of the fixed voice and broadband service rates offered to consumers in urban areas, aims to provide reasonable comparability benchmarks for fixed voice and broadband rates for universal service purposes.29 The
data provides information about providers in each state and the average rates offered for different broadband technologies, plans, and speeds, but does not offer information about serviced geographies within each state for each provider.30
This report uses the FCC Urban Rate Survey to illustrate associations between broadband speeds, technology type, and price. However, the broader analysis utilizes data from The Markup’s point-in time estimates of address-level broadband pricing data from cities,31 the “How We Uncovered Disparities in Internet Deals” dataset used to conduct a report on disparities in Internet speeds
offered for the same price in low-income versus middle-and-high income neighborhoods32 The data, collected in 2022, uses information from 800,000 Internet plans from four Internet service providers. Pricing information from these plans, representing the lowest price offered by each plan, is available at the address level for 38 cities and provides information about average download and
upload speeds offered for each plan.
There are limitations that come with using the Internet plan pricing data provided by The Markup. One, data is sampled from only one year (2022) and therefore cannot be used to illustrate changes in price over time. Two, the data often only contains pricing information for one or two providers per city, a phenomenon which is consistent with the way internet service providers often cover distinct geographies, however, it reduces variation in the data. The data, as it is used in this study, is only intended to provide illustrative, quantitative information on what broadband prices look like relative to median household income in cities but may or may not be representative.

It’s an interesting concept and I’d love to see a rural version of it. We don’t all define affordable by the same dollar amount (for any purchase!) so percentage of income makes sense. But the broadband services are not all the same and availability isn’t the same. What’s the cost of needing one service for speed and another for reliability? Or the cost of having no choices? These are factors that seem to be more prevalent in rural areas.

US-wide BEAD award has been 46 percent of original allocation – in MN that was 58 percent

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Telecompetitor reports…

Most states (45 as of Friday) have released their recommended awards in the Benefit of the Bargain round in the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The total value of the award recommendations for those states is less than half of initial allocations, according to a Telecompetitor analysis.

The initial allocation for the 45 states was about $32.8 billion. The total value of the award recommendations for the states is about $15.2 billion, or about 46% of the initial allocation.

Here is the allocation versus award by state:

Minnesota places well above average at 57.8 percent (versus US wide percentage of 46 percent) and ranks 12 in terms of percentage retained. But that could continue to change…

It’s important to keep in mind that the states’ recommendations for BEAD awards are not final. The recommendations still must be approved by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is rumored to be seeking reductions to the award amounts.

Connected Nation finds 30 percent of rural households are internet insecure

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Connected Nation has a new report on Internet Insecurity in Rural America. I like the distinction between access and secure access. The best analogy I can think it the difference between having a reliable car or a junker. Most of us know the difference, many of us from experience. A reliable car gets you to work on time. Gets your kids to school. Is what you are happy to take a 3am when contractions start coming. A junker is a car that may cost you a lot of money in repairs or gas mileage. It is always a car you aren’t sure is going to get you where you are going and honestly you don’t want your kids to drive it at night.

Connected Nation recognizes…

Connected Nation (CN) believes in the importance of sustained, reliable internet connectivity for every household. In this report, CN looks at “internet insecure” households whose internet adoption has been in flux. What we found underscores a need to address the issue of internet insecurity: not only do Americans need to get connected, but to benefit from broadband, they must STAY connected.

They surveyed 2,600 rural households in Michigan and Colorado to learn about the impact of Internet insecurity. If they had been in Minnesota, I’d dig deeper into the specifics, although I imagine they are similar, but here I’ll keep it high level…

KEY FINDINGS:

  • Roughly one-third (30.6%) of the surveyed population is internet insecure.

  • Households with children are more likely to experience intermittent internet connectivity, with one-third (34.2%) of households with children under 18 living at home being internet insecure.

  • People with disabilities are more likely to experience internet insecurity than people without disabilities.

  • Nearly 9 out of 10 (87.1%) internet insecure respondents say they rely on locations outside of their home to access the internet.

  • Despite irregular access to the internet, most of the internet insecure population (93.3%) still uses telehealth services.

The Broadband Equity Project: Minneapolis gap between broadband availability and adoption

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The Broadband Equity Project highlights the rate of internet/broadband adoption across different zip codes in many major cities and metropolitan areas, and uses census data to find key factors. Unfortunately, they tool only looks at the 7-county metro area, but it is searchable by city and county.

Here’s what they found about Minneapolis:

It’s interesting to scroll over the map, especially if you are focus on the 7-county metro area or part of that area

EVENT Sep 10: New Research Getting to Broadband Adoption for All

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From the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society…

Join us on September 10 at 2:00 p.m. ET for a webinar on broadband affordability and policy. Available via the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society’s YouTube page, the webinar will feature new research about broadband affordability and state legislative approaches to ensure the availability of affordable high-speed internet access. The discussion will highlight how broadband affordability, availability, and adoption relate to each other and present current and future opportunities to improve universal access.

Current federal investment in broadband infrastructure will go a long way to improve broadband availability, but it must be accompanied by affordability support if all Americans are to adopt broadband service. The expiration of the Affordable Connectivity Program in 2024, recent changes to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program’s requirements for a low-cost service option, and possible reforms to the Universal Service Fund have all influenced the current landscape.

Dr. Caroline Stratton, Research Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, will moderate a discussion with:

  • Dr. John Horrigan, Benton Senior Fellow and national expert on technology adoption, digital inclusion, and evaluating the outcomes and impacts of programs designed to promote communications technology adoption and use. Horrigan will share insights from his recent research reports, Budgeting for Broadband and Marking Progress, Targeting Gaps: Lessons from Broadband Adoption Trends, and his past research on the Lifeline Program.
  • Jordan Arnold, Master of Public Affairs candidate at Princeton University. She previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Biden-Harris White House, where she led work on broadband and economic development in the Office of the Chief of Staff. Arnold will present lessons from her new Benton research report about how states are approaching affordability in the absence of federal policy action.
  • Ambika Nair, Community Development Research Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, conducts research and data analysis on the financial well-being of low- and moderate-income communities. Nair will share findings from a forthcoming publication about the relative affordability of broadband in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

Tune in to learn more about what the practitioner and policymaking communities can do to ensure that low-income households can afford reliable, sustainable access to broadband internet service.