Some of the country’s largest incumbent Internet Service Providers received billions in federal subsidies to build out rural broadband networks through 2021. But the three largest recipients have stopped offering service to many as half the homes and businesses they once vowed to serve since funding stopped three years ago, a new study found.
The study, released in May by several California university researchers, underscored the need for more government oversight and better program design as billions in new broadband grant programs continue to flow, according to the authors. It also revealed some of the difficulties of subsidizing broadband as technologies continue to evolve.
More details from that study…
We use the broadband-plan querying tool (BQT) to curate a novel dataset that complements ISP-reported information with ISP-advertised broadband plan details (i.e., download speed and monthly cost) on publicly accessible websites. Specifically, we query advertised broadband plans for 687 k residential addresses, including a representative sample of 537 k addresses, across 15 states, certified as served by ISPs to regulators. Our analysis reveals significant discrepancies between ISP-reported data and actual broadband availability. We find that the serviceability rate—defined as the fraction of addresses ISPs actively serve out of the total queried, weighted by the number of CAF addresses in a census block group—is only 55.45%, dropping to as low as 18% in some states. Furthermore, the compliance rate—defined as the weighted fraction of addresses where ISPs actively serve and advertise download speeds above the FCC’s 10 Mbps threshold—is only 33.03%. We also observe that for a subset of census blocks, the CAF-funded addresses receive higher broadband speeds than their monopoly-served neighbors. These results indicate that while a few users have benefited from this multi-billion dollar program, it has largely failed to achieve its intended goal, leaving many targeted rural communities with inadequate or no broadband connectivity