Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies held a panel on Wednesday on how the federal government should promote broadband adoption and access to underserved communities.  The panel served as an update the National Broadband Plan, which came out one year ago.

“The biggest mistake we made when working on the plan was using the current framework to solve tomorrow’s problems” said keynote speaker, Blair Levin, one of the authors of the National Broadband Plan. “We need to phase out the Lifeline and Link-Up programs and come up with something new.”

Read more at BroadbandBreakfast.com.

As the one-year anniversary of the National Broadband Plan looms near, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (Joint Center) hosted a forum on March 2 entitled, The National Broadband Plan and the Underserved – One Year Later.

A program of the Joint Center’s Media and Technology Institute (MTI), this event was geared toward discerning progress in implementing the Plan.  Specifically, participants were asked to reflect on the impact that the Plan has had on connecting members of underserved communities to broadband opportunities. Underserved, in this instance, was a catch-all category looking to address the needs of low-income, disabled, rural, elderly, native American and non-English speaking populations.  Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Vice President of the Joint Center and Director of MIT, also challenged participants to ‘think outside the box’ so that “we’re not having the same discussions about the Plan a year from now.”

Read more at Politic365.

Nearly a year after the issuance of the National Broadband Plan (NBP), the plan's lead architect told a policy gathering on Wednesday that the Federal Communications Commission did not take the right approach to increasing broadband adoption among low-income households, and that it should be changed.

Blair Levin, who was Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC during the NBP's formulation and now serves as Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute, said that the plan should not have counted on transitioning the Universal Service Fund (USF) as its core strategy for expanding broadband access in for poor and rural households in underserved areas.  The USF currently provides subsidies to support basic monthly telephone service and initial installation or activation fees through the Lifeline/Link-up programs.

Read more at PR Newswire.

The bipartisan technology policy group TechNet gathered government officials and leading broadband scholars Tuesday to present the first set of academic research using data from the national broadband map.

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Ying Li and Mikyung Baek from the Joint Center on Political and Economic Studies looked at the correlation between broadband availability, income and race in Los Angeles, Chicago and South Carolina. They found that the heavily African American areas of Los Angeles had a low level of broadband availability. In South Carolina, they found that in areas where the overall population has a low income race did not affect availability.

Read more at BroadbandBreakfast.com.

This paper presents three case studies in the state of South Carolina, and the cities of Chicago, IL, and Los Angeles, CA, with in-depth analyses of wireline and wireless access in high minority, low-income communities. The findings of the study concluded that broadband service is becoming much more ubiquitous in high minority, low-income communities, yet levels of adoption still remain relatively low. The study also concluded that race is not a significant explanatory variable for disparate broadband deployment, and despite the availability of mobile broadband in low-income, high minority areas, wireless coverage is still inconsistent within regions.

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A supplemental appendix for this publication is also available here.

The numbers reported in this factsheet are based on the Joint Center's 1998 and 1999 National Opinion Polls. The 1998 responses are from telephone interviews with 1,606 adults, conducted in September 1998. The sample included a national general population sample of 850 and a national sample of 850 African Americans. The 1999 responses are based on telephone interviews with 1,678 adults, a national general population sample of 850 and a national sample of 900 African Americans. For both surveys, the statistical margin of error is +/- 3.5 percentage points. The 1998 numbers reported here vary somewhat from those reported by the Department of Commerce in the recently released report, Falling Through the Net, but the patterns of usage are the same. Differences in reported numbers are most likely related to differences in question wording, racial categories used (for example, the Commerce report excludes Hispanics from racial totals), and margins of error.

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During the last decade, technology has changed significantly and the diffusion of various forms of technology throughout the United States has been widespread, but uneven. Measuring the Divide examines the "digital divide" and several of the major factors that affect Internet use across and within racial groups, especially among African Americans. It also looks at how those who do have Internet connections use the Internet, as a way of informing how efforts might be made to make the Internet more engaging (as well as more accessible) to African Americans. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of broadband and the implications of its potential diffusion, particularly for health care, minority businesses, and African American communities. An appendix presents information on the characteristics of the African American population that affect Internet use in ten states and the District of Columbia.

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Date Published: March 2006
 

With the goal of connecting the vast majority of Americans to next-generation broadband over the next decade, the National Broadband Plan that was unveiled by the Federal Communications Commission last week offers a road map to full digital inclusion in our country.

If we succeed in meeting its goals, the plan could become one of the most influential documents of our era -- a blueprint not only for a new birth of equality and civil rights in the Information Age, but also for a more dynamic, competitive and vibrant society for the rest of this century.

For people of color, the poor, elderly, less-educated and disenfranchised, the stakes could not be higher.

Presently, nearly 100 million Americans, about a third of the country, are without a broadband connection to the Internet. According to the FCC, "they are older, poorer, less educated, more likely to be a racial or ethnic minority, and more likely to have a disability than those with a broadband Internet connection at home." Cost remains the primary barrier to entry, and limited digital proficiency, especially among seniors and the less educated, is also an important reason why many adults choose not to get online.

Our stubbornly high unemployment rate provides a glimpse of a wider problem, which is that too many in our work force are unprepared for rapid innovation in high-tech sectors that will dominate the global economy in the decades ahead.

Young people are not being equipped to meet the global competitiveness challenge in science, technology, engineering and math. Poor children in the inner city and many rural areas lack the textbooks, tools and teachers to help improve their readiness for the digital economy.

By charting a course toward universal connectivity to high-speed networks, the National Broadband Plan can help jump-start new efforts to address long-standing inequalities with regard to education and economic opportunity and thereby help bridge gaps that go far beyond the oft-mentioned digital divide. It's already happening among better-educated and more-affluent people of color. A recent study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that African-Americans and Hispanics in those categories are adopting broadband at the fastest rate of any group in the country.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun.

As computers and the Internet become more critical to daily life and work, America will benefit greatly from expanding the reach and capacity of broadband networks. The lack of access and technical literacy for some impacts quality of life, economic development, health care, education, environmental sustainability, public safety, and civic engagement for all U.S. communities. The federal, state, and local governments, in collaboration with the private sector, must play an active role in stimulating adoption and use of advanced broadband connections.