The Current State of Broadband: Intertwined Failures of Access, Adoption, and Quality

Broadband adoption in the United States is floundering compared to the rest of the world. In 2017, the percentage of households in the United States who reported that they had access to the internet using dial-up, ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), or cable broadband was only 78 percent. This placed the United States at 27th out of 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), well behind most other advanced economies.¹

The current state of broadband in the United States is best understood through the lens of three intertwining factors: access, adoption, and quality. The FCC, the agency responsible for regulating telecommunications services, has long considered the concept of access primarily in terms of deployment. That is, they have only considered the scope of an area where a company claims it could provide service, without assessing where companies actually do provide service. Similarly, the FCC has only considered the speeds that companies advertise, rather than the speeds they actually deliver.²

Unfortunately, the FCC’s data on deployment is severely flawed and overstates access. The FCC’s 2020 Broadband Deployment Report stated that around 18 million, or 5.6 percent of the population, lack an internet connection that meets the FCC’s current definition of high-speed broadband, which is any service that meets at least 25 megabits per second (Mbps) in download speed and 3 Mbps in upload speed. Although many parts of the country are served by several competing ISPs, many areas lack quality coverage from any providers. In fact, many independent studies show that the reality of access is far worse than FCC figures indicate because the FCC’s method of collecting data on broadband can lead to overstated deployment figures.³ FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks have spoken out about the “massive, erroneous overstatements of high-speed internet deployment” in FCC data, and the issue has received bipartisan criticism and scrutiny.⁴ A survey conducted in 2018 by the Pew Research Center found 24 percent of rural adults identified access to high-speed internet as a major problem in their local community, with an additional 34 percent of rural residents seeing this as at least a minor problem, meaning that roughly six in ten people in rural areas (58 percent) believe access to high-speed internet in their area is a problem.⁵

Adoption is the second key element to evaluate. Traditionally, broadband adoption has been defined as the percentage of the population that subscribes to broadband service.⁶ Advocates have pointed out, however, that meaningful broadband adoption depends on more than the subscription rate. Instead, it depends on whether people have service meeting the speed, quality, and capacity necessary to accomplish common tasks, whether they have the digital skills necessary to participate online, and whether they are on a personal device on a secure and convenient network.⁷

Cost can be a decisive factor—high prices discourage adoption. A survey published by the Pew Research Center in 2019 revealed that whereas 81 percent of households with incomes between $30,000 and $99,000 have home high-speed broadband service, 44 percent of adults with household incomes below $30,000 a year do not.⁸ The Office of Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that connectivity rates for home broadband are particularly low among HUD-assisted renter households, who are also more likely to depend exclusively on smartphones and other handheld and mobile devices to access the internet in the home.⁹ A survey from the Pew Research Center in 2019 found that half of non-broadband users surveyed say they do not subscribe to broadband because the cost of a monthly subscription is too expensive.¹⁰

The third key factor to evaluate is the quality of broadband service. Unfortunately, the poor quality of available services compounds the challenges faced by communities with scattered deployment, low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and other historically marginalized areas.¹¹ In 2017, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance found that AT&T was engaged in digital redlining, the practice of denying wealth-building opportunities and services based on community demographics, including income and ethnicity.¹² The company had discriminated against lower-income neighborhoods by restricting deployment of faster broadband technology to middle- and upper-income neighborhoods, while keeping communities with higher poverty rates on lower-quality, slower broadband technology.

Similarly, many communities across the United States report that their connections are slower than advertised speeds. In 2019, OTI created the United States of Broadband Map to visualize broadband speeds as reported by Measurement Lab, the largest, publicly available, open-source internet measurement effort in the world.¹³ The map shows differences between ISP-reported speeds and the speeds people actually experience. Quality matters, because slow internet is not just frustrating—it can be dangerous when people are relying on internet access for telehealth and other vital services.

*Corrected 2:15pm on July 14, 2020: A previous version of this report erroneously stated that "80 percent of respondents to the Pew survey on high-speed internet access citing cost as one reason they lacked in-home internet access." This has been changed to "A survey from the Pew Research Center in 2019 found that half of non-broadband users surveyed say they do not subscribe to broadband because the cost of a monthly subscription is too expensive." We regret this error.