Tag Archives: Dr. Brian Whitacre

Who is Using Faster Broadband

There was an interesting paper published in May – Who is  using the internet at faster speeds? The authors are Roberto Gallardo, the vice President for Engagement at Purdue University and Brian Whitacre, a Professor and the Jean & Patsy Neustadt Chair in the department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University.

The paper highlights some interesting observations that are contrary to conventional wisdom about broadband. The studies showed that the higher the percentage of Black non-Hispanics and Hispanics in a community, the higher the average download broadband speed. Conversely, the higher the percentage of White non-Hispanics, the lower the average broadband speeds.

The team had originally done a study based on 2021 speed tests that had shown this result. They were surprised by the results and wondered if the pandemic had some impact on 2021 data that might have skewed the findings. In a second study they looked at 2019 speed tests from before the pandemic as well as 2022 speed test data which is past the worst periods of the pandemic.

The second study confirmed the original findings. When the percentage of Black non-Hispanics and Hispanics increased by one percentage point, the average download speeds increased by roughly 5 Mbps in 2019 and rose to almost 7 Mbps and 12 Mbps in 2022, respectively.

The study also correlated factors like race and the presence of children in a home. There was a significant increase across the board in broadband speeds between 2019 and 2022 for all households with children. The study found that the impact was greater for the three years for Black non-Hispanics (almost 18 Mbps faster) compared to White non-Hispanics and Hispanics (roughly 14 Mbps faster for both groups).

Their overall conclusions were as follows:

  • Rural, older, and poorer groups are on the wrong side of the digital divide.
  • Having children in the home correlates with having faster broadband speeds than neighboring homes with no children.
  • There was a big difference before and after the pandemic in the broadband speeds in homes where people worked at home.
  • Higher education correlated with faster Internet use, particularly for upload speeds.
  • White non-Hispanics seem to be increasingly on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The team acknowledged that understanding the broadband landscape is complex and in all populations there were 20% to 30% of speed tests that could not be explained by the findings. The analysis also had no way to distinguish between households that were able to choose their broadband speed from multiple ISP options versus homes where there was a limited number of ISP options.

Like most academic papers, the team did not speculated on the reasons behind their findings, and just reported the statistics they uncovered. My firm has been doing broadband surveys and detailed interviews with residents for many years, and some of these results were not a surprise to me.

For example, I’ve heard many stories from homes with children who sacrifice to buy faster broadband speeds for their children. I was also not surprised to hear that those working from home have faster broadband speeds – because that is a prerequisite for landing such jobs. I’ve run across many stories of folks who have moved to where broadband is faster in order to work from home (or who moved away from areas with poor broadband).

It’s harder to understand why some of the other findings are true, such as the one that showed that the greater the percentage of Black non-Hispanics and Hispanics, the faster the broadband speeds. I’ve encountered counties with a big difference in the overall desire to have good broadband. For example, I’ve studied a few rural counties where a lot of residents took pride in not connecting to the Internet, while other counties in the same state had similar residents that were begging to get faster rural broadband. I haven’t the slightest idea how to correlate such widely different behavior with the national trends spotted by Gallardo and Whitacre, but I hope they keep digging to help folks like me understand the incredibly complex broadband landscape.

The Digital Redlining of Dallas

In 2018 Dr Brian Whitacre, an economist from Oklahoma State University looked in detail at the broadband offered by AT&T in Dallas County, Texas. It’s an interesting county in that it includes all of the City of Dallas as well as wealthy suburban areas. Dr. Whitaker concluded that AT&T has engaged for years in digital redlining – in providing faster broadband only in the more affluent parts of the area.

Dr. Whitaker looked in detail at AT&T’s 477 data at the end of 2017 provided to the FCC. AT&T reports the technology used in each census blocks as well as the ‘up-to’ maximum speed offered in each census block.

AT&T offers three technologies in Dallas county:

  • Fiber-to-the-home with markets speeds up to 1 Gbps download. AT&T offers fiber in 6,287 out of 23,463 census blocks (26.8% of the county). The average maximum speed offered in these census blocks in late 2017 according to the 477 data was 300 Mbps.
  • VDSL, which brings fiber deep into neighborhoods, and which in Dallas offers speeds as fast as 75 Mbps download. AT&T offers this in 10,399 census blocks in Dallas (44.3% of the county). AT&T list census blocks with maximum speeds of 18, 24, 45, and 75 Mbps. The average maximum speed listed in the 477 data is 56 Mbps.
  • ADSL2 or ADSL2+, which is one of the earliest forms of DSL and is mostly deployed from central offices. The technology theoretically delivers speeds up to 24 Mbps but decreases rapidly for customers more than a mile from a central office. AT&T still uses ADSL2 in 6,777 census blocks (28.9% of the county). They list the maximum speeds of various census blocks at 3, 6, 12, and 18 Mbps. The average speed of all ADSL2 census blocks is 7.26 Mbps.

It’s worth noting before going further that the above speed differences, while dramatic, doesn’t tell the whole story. The older ADSL technology has a dramatic drop in customer speeds with distances and speeds are also influenced by the quality of the copper wires. Dr. Whitaker noted that he had anecdotal evidence that some of the homes that were listed as having 3 Mbps of 6 Mbps might have speeds under 1 Mbps.

Dr. Whitaker then overlaid the broadband availability against poverty levels in the county. His analysis started by looking at Census blocks have at least 35% of households below the poverty level. In Dallas County, 6,777 census blocks have poverty rates of 35% or higher.

The findings were as follows:

  • Areas with high poverty were twice as likely to be served by ADSL – 56% of high-poverty areas versus 24% of other parts of the city.
  • VDSL coverage was also roughly 2:1 with 25% of areas with high poverty served by VDSL while 48% of the rest of the city had VDSL.
  • Surprisingly, 19% of census blocks with high poverty were served with fiber. I’m going to conjecture that this might include large apartment complexes where AT&T delivers one fiber to the whole complex – which is not the same product as fiber-to-the-home.

It’s worth noting that the findings are somewhat dated and rely upon 477 data from November 2017. AT&T has not likely upgraded any DSL since then, but they have been installing fiber in more neighborhoods over the last two years in a construction effort that recently concluded. It would be interesting to see if the newer fiber also went to more affluent neighborhoods.

I don’t know that I can write a better conclusion of the findings than the one written by Dr. Whitacre: “The analysis for Dallas demonstrates that AT&T has withheld fiber-enhanced broadband improvements from most Dallas neighborhoods with high poverty rates, relegating them to Internet access services which are vastly inferior to the services enjoyed by their counterparts nearby in the higher-income Dallas suburbs…”

This study was done as a follow-up to work done earlier in Cleveland, Ohio and this same situation can likely be found in almost every large city in the country. It’s not hard to understand why ISPs like AT&T do this – they want to maximize the return on their investment. But this kind of redlining is not in the public interest and is possibly the best argument that can be made for regulating broadband networks. We regulated telephone companies since 1932, and that regulation resulted in the US having the best telephone networks in the world. But we’ve decided to not regulate broadband in the same way, and until we change that decision we’re going to have patchwork networks that create side-by-side haves and have-nots.