Thu, 08/05/2021
This post is a summary of Episode 30 of The Nebraska Governance & Technology Center’s (NGTC) Podcast Series, Tech Refactored. In this episode, host NGTC Director Gus Hurwitz was joined by Christina Biedny, Brian Whitacre, Roberto Gallardo, Tim Obermier, Angela Hollman, and Jacob Manlove to discuss the “digital divide,” or the difference in access to high-speed internet between various demographic groups, especially along the a rural/urban divide. The episode is composed of separate conversations between individual research groups.
Jacob Manlove
Manlove’s research focused on the impacts of broadband availability in Arkansas public schools, and its consequences for education during the pandemic. Manlove notes that, as the pandemic struck U.S. parents were suddenly forced to confront a number of novel choices about how to keep their families healthy, as well as preserving the health of their communities overall. One inflection point in that decision process was whether to keep their children in in-person education, or undertake remote learning. For some families that choice was mandated, but for other families in Arkansas, they were given the option of choosing in person or remote education. But for families without decent broadband internet access, that choice was virtually no choice at all, although some did find difficult alternative arrangements, including having their children access the internet in the parking lot of a business, rather than send them to in person schooling.
Hurwitz notes that Manlove’s research opportunity essentially came out of what is known as a “natural experiment,” that is to say a set of conditions that would have been unavailable to researchers but for the horrific reality of the pandemic - essentially “making some lemonade out of that really terrible batch of lemons.”
While the study found that access to high quality broadband was a strong predictor of whether families would choose remote learning, it also identified several other “confounding variables” that may have affected that conclusion as well. One of those was political ideology, with those whose political views gave them a more skeptical view toward the effects of Covid-19 more likely to keep their students in in person learning. Overall, Manlove identified the next major points for research inquiry as being whether an access point to the internet had to be at home in order for parents to choose to opt for a remote learning environment, or whether that environment could be a nearby remote access point to which students might have shared access..
Christina Biedny, Brian Whitacre, Roberto Gallardo
The focus of our second group was an examination of the “relatively unstudied policy initiatives known as ‘dig once’ and ‘expedited permitting,’”and what effect they have had on the availability of broadband in the United States. The “dig once” principle provides that any time a state or municipal government intends to do road construction or any other operation where they will be digging trenches in the ground, they are supposed to let ISP (internet services providers) know of their plans, in case they want to utilize that as an opportunity to lay more fiber conduit. In theory, this should lead to efficiencies as ISPs incur less costs and have more opportunities to lay conduit without the added expenses they would sustain if they were to conduct their own digs on their existing schedules.
In order to compare the effectiveness of the “dig once” scheme, Biedny, Whitacre, and Gallardo compared the outcomes in Iowa against a control group of demographically similar other states that don’t have such policies. Interestingly, the team found that “dig once” and “expedited permitting did not have a significant impact on fiber or fixed wireless internet availability. This may be the case, in part, because although the law requires that ISPs be notified in instances where states and municipalities plan to dig, there is no formal mechanism for letting them know that a project in pending - it’s more of an ad hoc arrangement where, if a dig is going to occur in an area that might be of interest to a given ISP, the state department of transportation might “shoot so-and-so an email” rather than having a formalized process in place for ensuring that notifications are happening on a formalized basis. Thus the efficacy of these programs remains unclear absent a more systematic approach for notifying ISPs.
Angela Hollman, Tim Obermier
In their project, Hollman and Obermier were trying to assess, quantitatively, what the needs of a resident or business owner are, in terms of the bandwidth of their internet connection. The two researchers initially became interested in the differences in the types of products being offered by internet companies, both in urban environments and rural areas, because they both initially come from rural areas, and they realize that affordable, high-quality internet is essential for the survival of some of these areas.
In describing their work, Obermier outlined what a “tariff” is in this context: in a circumstance where a company exercises a natural monopoly, regulators may hold that any increase in the cost of services has to be justified by a “tariff,” essentially a statement of why the cost increase is necessary and what the proposed benefit will be for consumers.
In conducting their research, the team concluded that, to meaningfully assess the degree to which individual data consumers are satisfied with the service they are being provided, researchers will need to look at individual times of day, both times of peak consumption, and times where less data is being consumed. They will then be able to compare that to real-time reported data about how satisfied users are with the service they are receiving at that time, in order to assess whether any frustration is, for example, related to the amount of bandwidth that they are able to receive at peak periods of consumption, or an overall frustration with the quality of service that they are receiving generally. The data derived from such a process would be important because, right now, there is very little information about the nature of how much data individuals use at given times, and how that impacts their assessments of the quality of their internet service experience.
Interestingly, the team also found that there was a significant discrepancy between what people thought they needed, in terms of data speeds, and the speeds they actually required in practice. The study found that the average household consumer requires 10 mbps during periods of intense usage (that is, each individual consumer - multiple consumers often exist within a household), but households believed they required 33 to 34 mbps per person. Secondly, the existing infrastructure within a home is often a limiting factor - many people are operating with old, out of date routers that limit data to 11 mbps shared over multiple users - thus in these situations simply increasing the amount of overall data supplied by an isp won’t actually solve a problem that is fundamentally related to the underlying technology available at the home. Further evidence of how, when we look at solving a problem only at a macro scale, we fundamentally risk missing the forest for the trees.
Tags: Tech Refactored Review
