Exploring Digital Equity Fact Sheets
ILSR’s Exploring Digital Equity Fact Sheet Series unpacks the issues, challenges, and opportunities of bringing broadband access to everyone. … Read More
Field Reports: Municipal Broadband and Digital Equity in Baltimore
The digital divide has only become more pronounced with the pandemic, prompting Baltimore officials to make moves in the direction of something exciting: building a city-owned, open access fiber network.… Read More
Franklin County, Ohio Aims to Address Digital Equity in Urban Areas
The Franklin County Digital Equity Coalition was borne out of the emergency needs presented by the pandemic, but has shaped up to be a good model for how to address the broadband issues facing urban communities across the country. After 11 months of meeting and planning, the coalition released a framework in March outlining its five pillars of focus: broadband affordability, device access, digital life skills and technical support, community response and collaboration, and advocacy for broadband funding and policy. As part of its efforts, the coalition also developed two pilot programs to increase broadband access in parts of the city that need it most.… Read More
Illinois City Brings No-Cost Internet Access to Students in Mobile Home Park
When schools in Champaign, Illinois, realized that many kids living in a mobile home park weren’t online after the pandemic hit, a coalition came together to build the students a free fixed wireless network.… Read More
San Antonio Using City Infrastructure to Connect 20,000 Students in Need
A new initiative in San Antonio, Texas, called Connected Beyond the Classroom, which will begin launching over the next weeks, will leverage city-owned fiber infrastructure and $27 million in CARES Act funds to connect 20,000 students across the city’s 50 most-vulnerable neighborhoods in a bid to close the digital divide and ensure teachers, students, and their parents can continue to learn this fall and beyond.… Read More
“We Can’t Build It and Just Assume People Will Come”: Digital Inclusion and Equity Today
Today on the podcast we welcome Angela Siefer and Craig Settles. Together, they untangle the long history of broadband subsidies and racial bias, and how that has come to influence who has affordable connection options today. They also talk about the current stage of telehealth and the ramifications of the Digital Equity Act since its adoption a year ago.… Read More
Homework Gap Hits Communities of Color Harder
Millions of students do not have access to adequate connectivity, but Black, Latinx, and Native children are disproportionately impacted by the “homework gap.” One study found that children in one out of every three Black, Latinx, and Native American households did not have broadband access at home.… Read More
Chattanooga Uses Municipal Network to Give Students Free Internet Connections
Yesterday in an announcement via livestream, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hamilton County Schools, and the fiber arm of municipal utility Electric Power Board (EPB) announced a partnership to provide free Internet access and hardware to the 17,700 homes with school children on free or reduced lunch programs in the county.… Read More
New Paper Reveals Systemic Racism of Government Programs That Invest Only in Rural Internet
For years, federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars on efforts to build broadband networks in underserved rural communities while doing very little to bring home Internet access to unconnected Americans living in our nation’s cities. A new white paper, released recently by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), outlines how this policy decision has a racist impact — benefiting mainly white, non-Hispanic people while disadvantaging many Black Americans and people of color in urban areas, where the majority of unconnected households are.… Read More