Background

Introduction and Motivation

Broadband internet access has become a core infrastructure, comparable in importance to water, electricity and transportation. Few people would purchase a home that does not offer running water, reliable electricity and a road to get there – and increasingly, few would want to live permanently in a home without fast, reliable and affordable internet connectivity. This transition from a valuable, but somewhat secondary, infrastructure to a crucial utility, largely during the last decade, has made researching broadband connectivity ever more relevant. While the United States and other high-income countries have now deployed some kind of internet access to above 90% of households and nearly 100% of young adults access the internet by various means (typically by smartphone), adoption and availability of key internet applications with societal benefits, such as remote work, telehealth and distance education, remains much lower, particularly for households with lower income and those living in rural areas. “A recent Harris Poll commissioned by National 4-H Council and Microsoft found that 21% of teens don’t have internet access at home but instead rely on schools, libraries, and other public places to get access.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed both the potential of broadband and the remaining challenges. Residential internet access has made it possible for many white-collar employees to work from home, has allowed potentially infected individuals to consult with health care professionals without endangering them, and has allowed some K-12 and college students to continue their education, even if diminished, during the spring of 2020. But it has also starkly illustrated the inequities in access, where some students could approximate their classroom experience by video conference and engaging with rich instructional materials, while others had to rely on school buses providing Wi-Fi and pick up work sheets while sitting in a library parking lot, if they could get broadband at all.

The primary focus of the workshop and report is the ”internet (broadband) as infrastructure,” i.e., the concerns that arise trying to make broadband universal, affordable, and reliable, as well as to provide an infrastructure that enables rather than constrains novel applications and improvements of existing key applications. Architecturally, the emphasis will be on network access, i.e., the so-called last mile, in all modalities, and key related infrastructure such as middle mile, internet exchanges (IXPs) and edge cloud computing.

However, this does not mean that discussion should be restricted to broadband access in isolation. An important dimension of infrastructure is the connection of technical access with educational resources, housing, job requirements, small business needs, individual skills, and other important aspects within the policy and societal context. Of interest are the links between digital inclusion and improved social outcomes, including health, educational attainment, social mobility, and financial literacy.

Since the last Report was published in January 2017, concerns about internet applications, privacy, security and dominance by a small number of global enterprises have consumed a larger share of attention of researchers and the public. These topics, however, require different research approaches than the more infrastructure-focused research discussed here, are addressed by a different research community and will likely also have a different audience of “research consumers” in the policy analysis community, governments and civic society. Thus, while we anticipate that concerns about privacy and misinformation, for example, will enter into discussions about non-adoption, they are beyond the scope of this effort.

The 2017 report, including the 2016 “Broadband 2021” workshop report, still raises many research issues that deserve attention, and will likely continue to be relevant until we have universal availability and adoption, but they seem insufficiently precise and actionable, in my view. Indeed, in many cases, one could replace “broadband systems,” for example, with “transportation system” or “water system” and ask similar questions. Thus, one goal of the workshop will be to dig one layer deeper. As a hypothetical example, Technology and Engineering Economics RQ1 (page 8) asked “What factors should be considered in engineering-economic models of broadband systems that employ novel technical approaches?” A more focused question might ask: “What factors currently drive capital and operational costs in rural and urban 5G and fiber networks, what technologies and approaches have shown promise to reduce those expenses, what has prevent their adoption so far and what experiments or data are needed to validate these approaches?”

Given the audience and to maintain focus, the workshop and report will primarily consider broadband within the context of the United States, including its particular social, economic, topographical and regulatory conditions. However, since many of the problems (such as reaching rural areas), research questions, data issues, and approaches are similar, we will strive to incorporate viewpoints and insights from other countries with comparable broadband concerns and strong research efforts, such as the European Union, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Goals

The overall goal of the workshop and the resulting report will to describe the key research questions for broadband for the next roughly five years, why they are important to reaching societal goals and what the federal government, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions can do to advance these research objectives.

This workshop series will summarize the progress in broadband research, deployment and use since the last report. It will also to highlight continuing and emerging research issues in (i) broadband technology and deployment; (ii) the economics of broadband; and (iii) digital inclusion.

The report, building on the 2016 “Broadband 2021” approach, will

  • identify important and timely research areas, in engineering, economics and social sciences;

  • describe existing and missing collections of data that enable and ground that research;

  • explore how research efforts can be better coordinated across federal government, the academic community and the broader broadband research community.

The report will provide recommendations, such as new or modified research funding, research accompanying federal broadband deployment and adoption efforts, and the necessary infrastructure (e.g., data or testbeds) to improve research quality and impact.

The workshop and report will be guided by a set of guiding operating principles:

  • Actionable recommendations: The workshop participants will be asked to formulate actionable and verifiable goals, with sufficient concreteness that their completion can be determined factually. For example, rather than asking for generic “better data,” the report might identify specific data sources and who would need to gather the data or make it available.

  • Prioritize research goals: It is tempting to simply enumerate goals and research issues, but in an environment with severely constrained resources, the workshop participants will be asked to rank or weight objectives by their impact and resource needs, distinguishing between “nice to know” and “critical for good policy making,” for example.

  • Identify necessary resources: The workshop participants will be asked to clearly describe the nature of the resources, e.g., funding, staff, legal or regulatory authority, necessary to implement goals and objectives. As the 2017 report noted, in some cases, having institutional, long-term resources and data collections is particularly important, and may take precedence over granularity.

  • Reflection on audience: Broadband research has the potential to influence policy, such as the eight-billion dollar annual expenditures for the FCC universal service program. Other research might guide practitioners in digital inclusion efforts or help prioritize research funding. Thus, the research issues should clearly identify the audience – who needs this information, how timely and frequent does it need to be updated and what does the likely “consumer” of the research need to know to help them?

  • Inclusive: As infrastructure, broadband touches everybody, but particular groups have been particularly affected by lack of access or use, including people with disabilities, Native Americans, low-income households, people of color and seniors. The workshop will strive to incorporate voices from communities representing these groups, to help identify research needs and challenges.

Sample Questions

These questions are illustrative and not meant to cover the breadth of topics or to restrict the inquiry of the workshop participants.

  • Have our definitions and expectations of broadband deployment changed since the last report, e.g., because of much higher use of smartphones and in-home devices such as smart speakers?

  • What progress in broadband mapping and deployment has occurred since the last report?

  • What are the fundamental barriers to providing broadband service to everyone, and have those changed since the last report?

  • Are there new technologies or approaches that have already proven themselves or show particular promise for addressing the digital divide?

  • Are there measurable socioeconomic impacts in areas where there has been strong broadband deployment over the past five years?

  • What broadband research in the past few years has been particularly influential or has changed how the research or policy community think about key issues?

  • Where did predictions made by researchers turn out to be prescient or where did general consensus go wrong?

  • Has the COVID-19 transition to “online everything” changed the landscape?

  • Are there new research questions that are just emerging?

  • Are there “classical” questions that may have become less important and may face diminishing returns?

  • Are there long-running research issues that would benefit from approaches that emphasize continuity and longitudinal study, in the spirit of the Nurses’ Health Study, where the evolution and effects of broadband can be observed over longer time periods, even if focused on a smaller geographic region or user population? If so, how can such projects be sustained?

  • How can research and data collection be integrated into federal and state efforts, starting from their design phase?

  • Are there other governmental entities, such as the Census Bureau, the Department of Education or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that have had only modest involvement in broadband research, but could both improve their data gathering and contribute data that has long eluded the research community (e.g., broadband pricing data or data related to the educational impact of not having broadband access at home)?

  • Are there lessons to be learned from how non-US government agencies interact with the research community or leverage broadband research?