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Content tagged with "academic"

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Study: Lack of Internet Access Leads to Increased Covid-19 Mortality Rates in Rural, Suburban, and Urban Communities

Two decades into the twenty-first century, it still feels a little strange to justify all of the obvious ways that Internet access serves as a key pillar among the social determinants of health (SDOH) that govern our individual and collective wellbeing. The concept itself is at least two hundred years old: a German pathologist named Rudolph Virchow is often quoted as saying in the late 1840s, in response to the privation he saw in the run-up to the 1848 revolutions, that “medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” 

Our modern framing of the problem comes in large part from the World Health Organization, which in the preamble to its 1946 constitution wrote that “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” In 2020, the FCC has called broadband access a “super social determinant of health” in 2020, precisely because it serves as a gateway to all of the other elements of life that foster healthiness and wellbeing, from access to education, information, better food, economic opportunity, and socialization. 

But a recent study published to the JAMA Open Network makes the connection even more explicit. In it, a team of researchers at The Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago show that a lack of Internet access has been strongly correlated with higher Covid-19 mortality rates across every type of household and in rural, suburban, and urban areas alike. 

Internet Access Most Strongly Correlated with Covid-19 Mortality Rates

New Study Shows State Barriers to Community Networks Decrease Broadband Availability

That community networks act as a positive force in the broadband market is something we’ve covered for the better part of a decade, but a new study out in the journal Telecommunications Policy adds additional weight (along with lots of graphs and tables) which shows that states which enact barriers to entry for municipalities and cooperatives do their residents a serious disservice. 

“State Broadband Policy: Impacts on Availability” by Brian Whitacre (Oklahoma State University) and Robert Gallardo (Purdue University), out in the most recent issue of the journal, demonstrates that enacting effective state policies have a significant and undeniable impact on the pace of basic broadband expansion in both rural and urban areas, as well as speed investment in fiber across the United States. 

Digging into the Data

The research relies on the State Broadband Policy Explorer, released in July of 2019 by Pew Charitable Trusts, and focuses on broadband availability across the country from 2012-2018. Whitacre and Gallardo control for the other common factors which can affect whether an area has broadband or not (like household income, education, and the age of the development), and combine the FCC’s Form 477 census block-level data along with county-level data to explore expansion activities over the seven-year period. By making use of an analytical model called the Generalized Method of Moments, Whitacre and Gallardo are able to track all of these variables over a period of time to show that there is a statistically robust connection between specific state policies and their influence on the expansion of broadband Internet access all over the United States. 

GATEWay Fiber is Miami Valley, Ohio's Door to the Future

While new municipal networks often (and rightly!) catch headlines for dramatically improving the lives of residents by giving them access to high-speed, reliable, low-cost Internet access, institutional networks also remain a tried-and-true model for cities and regions looking to begin investing in their information future. And, by connecting government buildings, schools, public libraries, and other community anchor institutions, they save communities money and can serve as an alternative when monopoly ISPs like Comcast try to negotiate huge fee increases to basic city services without any explanation (like in the case of Martin County, FL). 

The Miami Valley, Ohio, region accomplished the same goal a year ago, when GATEway Fiber lit up its intergovernmental, multi-jurisdictional fiber network connecting eight member cities and dozens of municipal buildings, schools, and other public anchor institutions. The result of six years of effort, the project provides the capacity and technical expertise for present and future undertakings to enhance educational initiatives, public safety programs, and utility work, and provides a model for other communities looking to work together to secure their information infrastructure moving forward.

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A Joint Venture

Paper Examines the "Growing Costs of Network Exclusion"

Most of us are familiar either with Metcalfe's law or the general principle of it: networks are more valuable the more people are on it. The common example used to illustrate is a telephone. One person on a telephone network is useless. Two people is an improvement. With millions, you are far more likely to be able to call the person you want to. Metcalfe network effect Recognizing this principle flips common arguments about connecting rural areas on their head. Ensuring that people in rural areas are connected benefits everyone -- it is not charity. Connecting people in rural areas increases the value of the connections in urban areas, creating more value for everyone. But the flip side may be too rarely considered. As these networks have grown in size (and therefore value), the cost of those who are excluded from them also increases significantly. This means that while the costs of not connecting rural areas are high today, those costs will be even greater in coming years. The argument is rather intuitive, but for those who want to learn more, Rahul Tongia and Ernest J Wilson III published an academic paper this year in the International Journal of Communications. The abstract for "The Flip Side of Metcalfe's Law: Multiple and Growing Costs of Network Exclusion" is here:
The study of networks has grown recently, but most existing models fail to capture the costs or loss of value of exclusion from the network. Intuitively, as a network grows in size and value, those outside the network face growing disparities. We present a new framework for modeling network exclusion, showing that costs of exclusion can be absolute, and might, at the extreme, eventually grow exponentially, regardless of underlying network structure. We find that costs of exclusion can also be spread to the “included” through several mechanisms such as parallel networks, and we also highlight how future research needs to capture the interaction of alternate or parallel networks to the network at hand. Backed by empirical evidence, this will have wide-reaching policy and design implications, particularly for the role of subsidies or direct intervention for network access and inclusion.

Bureaucrats as Entrepreneurs: Do Municipal Telecommunications Providers Hinder Private Entrepreneurs?

We consider how government-owned enterprises affect privately owned rivals. Specifically, we compare the types of markets that municipally owned telecommunications providers in the United States serve to the types of markets that competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) serve. We find that CLECs focus on potential profitability while municipalities appear to respond to other factors, such as political considerations or the desire to provide competition to incumbents. As a result, municipal providers tend to serve markets that CLECs do not. We also find that the presence of a municipal provider in a market does not affect the probability that a CLEC also serves that market. Our results suggest municipalities may not pose a significant competitive threat to CLECs and do not preclude CLEC participation.

Broadband and Economic Development: A Municipal Case Study from Florida

In this paper, we explore whether broadband investment by municipalities has an effect on economic growth. To do so, we employ an econometric model to compare economic growth in Lake County, Florida, with other similar Florida counties. In 2001, Lake County – a small county in central Florida – began generally offering private businesses and municipal institutions access to one of Florida’s most extensive, municipally-owned broadband networks, with fiber optic connections to hospitals, doctor offices, private businesses, and 44 schools.1 Our econometric model shows that Lake County has experienced approximately 100% greater growth in economic activity – a doubling – relative to comparable Florida counties since making its municipal broadband network generally available to businesses and municipal institutions in the county. Our findings are consistent with other analyses that postulate that broadband infrastructure can be a significant contributor to economic growth. Our results suggest that efforts to restrict municipal broadband investment could deny communities an important tool in promoting economic development.

Empirical Study: Does Municipal Supply of Communications Crowd-Out Private Communications Investment?

There are 2,007 municipalities across the United States that provide electricity service to their constituents. Of these, over 600 provide some sort of communications services to the community. An important policy question is whether or not public investment in communications crowds out private investment, or whether such investment encourages additional entry by creating wholesale markets and economic growth. We test these two hypotheses – the crowding out and stimulation hypothesis – using a recent dataset for the state of Florida. We find strong evidence favoring the stimulation hypothesis, since public investment in communications network increases competitive communications firm entry by a sizeable amount.