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?

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.

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.

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.