Access to high-speed internet has become crucial to staying connected—to jobs, medical care, social services, and many other parts of life. A new paper by Ashley Cate, Steven Moen, and IDS Affiliate Kaiping Chen suggests that Wisconsin broadband expansion efforts can be made more effective by accounting for local conditions and needs.
In their paper, Cate, Moen, and Chen add to the existing research base on Wisconsin’s “digital divide” by using county-level data to better understand broadband access and returns on public investments. This is significant because, as Cate notes, “The state of Wisconsin has a few urban centers but is mostly made up of vast rural areas where broadband access varies greatly.” High speed internet access has the potential to increase economic growth, access to social services, and connectivity, particularly in some rural areas. In Wisconsin, rural areas have seen improved access to broadband services in recent years, but even when broadband is available, many households may not actually adopt high speed internet.
There are large differences in government broadband subsidies across Wisconsin and the authors find that there was at best a weak relationship between public investments in broadband services and actual rates of adoption in the 2017 to 2021 period they studied. However, they also find that, at the county level, variations in education, household income, age, and distance from urban areas are all associated with differences in county broadband adoption rates. This finding tracks with previous research showing that factors such as education level and age are more closely related to broadband adoption rates than broadband availability.
Beyond basic availability, explanations for low broadband adoption rates can be complex. Because of this, Cate, Moen, and Chen bolstered their quantitative study by interviewing different stakeholders around Wisconsin to better understand reasons why households might be unable or unwilling to adopt high speed internet. The interviews revealed challenges that included the inability to afford monthly subscription rates and uncertainty about the benefits of faster internet access.
Cate says, “At the end of the day, broadband access is only the first piece of the puzzle and a lot of the outcomes for people’s lives depend upon how and why broadband is used.” But the authors say that increasing the broadband access within communities and offering support behind internet services has significant potential to help people of all backgrounds flourish.
Wisconsin is a politically, economically, and geographically diverse state, and has often served as a test case for issues of public policy. Because of this, lessons from this study have implications beyond the state’s borders. Moen says, “We hope that other researchers can use our approach and methodology as a starting point for similar analyses in other states.”
Ashley Cate is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at UW–Madison
Steven Moen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics at UW–Madison
Kaiping Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at UW–Madison and an IDS Affiliate