Ubiquitous and equitable connectivity is essential for society to realize the full potential of a global digital economy, supporting the inclusion of all citizens and removing barriers to information and services. Bridging the digital divide is a problem that requires solutions for accessibility, affordability, and digital skills that touch social economics, infrastructure, and technology. Solutions are available using existing technologies that provide quality, reliable, and secure internet access to enable unfettered participation in the digital economy.
It took a pandemic to make us aware
The transition to work from home (WFH), learn from home (LFH), and telehealth forced by the COVID pandemic highlighted the digital divide in underserved rural and urban areas. In the U.S., the goal to bridge the digital divide has bipartisan support. President Joseph Biden’s infrastructure plan seeks to bridge the digital divide by bringing affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American through an investment of USD 100 billion.
Be part of the solution: Register for the upcoming IEEE CQR Digital Divide workshop
The digital divide is not just an access issue. The pandemic exposed the issues of affordability, quality of coverage, and technical skills needed to get children online. According to research from Common Sense Media, nine million students in the U.S. lacked both home connectivity and an internet-enabled device. The study found vulnerable students lived in rural areas, federally subsidized or unstable housing, and were impacted by a variety of other demographic factors, including poverty, disability, language and race. The reality of the divide was made strikingly obvious to so many as schools scrambled to provide laptops and mobile devices to connect students when COVID-19 sent students home to online learning. Much of the lesson time was spent giving instruction on how to use the tools, find online teaching resources, and modify teaching methods to deliver online instruction.
The Nation Urban League (NUL) has also addressed the digital divide through the Lewis Latimer Plan. This plan calls for deployment of broadband networks to every household with steps to improve affordability and delivery of services while including underserved communities in the development of the digital economy. In a recent press release, NUL President and CEO Marc H. Morial stated, “As the COVID-19 pandemic has so starkly illuminated, broadband is a necessity, not a nicety. Even where networks are available, tens of millions of Americans have not adopted broadband in their homes—either because they can’t afford it or they don’t know how to use it.” Morial also noted that “…the Adoption Gap is approximately three times larger than the Availability Gap.”[1] Edward Smith II, NUL Senior Director for the Latimer Plan, added, “If adopted, the Latimer Plan would improve how our country delivers healthcare, education, job training, and other government services in ways that will benefit all Americans, especially those in marginalized communities.” [2]
Nicole Turner Lee of the Brookings Institute has been a public proponent on closing the digital divide. In her March 22 Tech Tank Podcast “To Build Back Better, The U.S. Needs A Digital Service Corps”[3], she advocated for programs to create a diverse digital service corps to build the pipeline of talent to help close the knowledge and adoption gap.
A digital economy works when everyone has the opportunity to participate
During the COVID pandemic, WFH (Work from Home), LFH (Learn from Home) and telehealth visits became the norm around the globe—those trends are not going away and there are dramatic shifts in the use of ICT infrastructure that accompany those changes. Previously relied-upon quality high-speed internet access at a school or business is no longer assured, particularly with many households, each with multiple family members, needing access for applications simultaneously demanding increased bandwidth. In its letter to the President in October 2020, the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), noted that peak network traffic demand shifted in location, time of day, duration and the types of services leveraged as working from home, telehealth and distance learning increased.[4] In the period of March through July 2020, CTIA, which represents the U.S. wireless communications industry, reported that its mobile provider members experienced a 19.6 percent increase in data traffic, 24.3 percent increase in voice traffic, and 25 percent increase in texting.[5] Wireline infrastructure traffic also grew substantially in the early period of COVID, later leveling off to an average of 10 percent increase, per USTelecom.[6]
In a December 2020 Harvard Business Review article, it was noted that, despite the dramatic impacts COVID-19 had on people’s lives, the U.S. scored second highest in digital evolution maturity, behind only Singapore. The study goes on to explain that the successful countries prioritize:
- expanding adoption of digital consumer tools (e-commerce, digital payments, entertainment, and the like)
- attracting, training, and retaining digital talent
- fostering digital entrepreneurial ventures
- providing fast, universal, terrestrial (such as fiber optics) and mobile broadband internet access
- specializing in the export of digital goods, services, or media
- coordinating innovation between universities, businesses, and digital authorities[7]
A stable and high-performing economy requires a digitally adept base of workers, students, and providers of essential services. It is clear that the workforce of the future is going to be increasingly reliant on locally available, uniform, high-speed internet access as WFH/LFH/telehealth patterns stabilize—if this requirement is unmet in certain areas, the existing problem of the digital divide will only increase.
We have the technology to solve this today
Bridging the digital divide is a problem that requires solutions for accessibility, affordability, and digital skills that touch social economics, infrastructure, and technology. Solutions require consideration for distribution of online devices, technical instruction to safely and productively use those devices and the internet, geography for the installation of internet access, affordability of that access, quality of access to enable productive WFH/LFH participation, and security to ensure that people are not exploited. If the goal is to have digital inclusion as quickly as possible, then consideration also needs to be made for the cost and timeline to build internet access in underserved areas when choosing between fiber optic, satellite and 5G wireless connectivity. Technology such as fixed wireless access (FWA), advanced antenna systems (including MIMO), network slicing capabilities, and network automation and performance monitoring can be deployed to optimize the quality of wireless access. These options are available to us today—it is now a matter of selecting and applying the best technologies to solve the problem.
IEEE CQR invites you to be part of the solution
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (www.ieee.org) is the world’s largest association of technical professionals with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries. While its purpose is the educational and technical advancement of electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer engineering and allied disciplines, its mission is to advance technology for humanity. It is with that mission in mind that the IEEE Communication Society’s technical committee for Communications Quality and Reliability (CQR) is hosting a virtual workshop on Thursday, May 13 to address solutions to bridge the digital divide. CQR is honored that this workshop will have keynotes from Edward “Smitty” Smith, former FCC official now with DLAPiper, and Dan Sjöblom, Director General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS). The workshop will also feature a panel discussion with Nicol Turner-Lee, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, Eric Burger, Georgetown University and formerly of the FCC and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Bhushan Joshi, Head of Sustainability & Corporate Responsibility for Ericsson North America. Industry technical talks presented by leaders from Blu Wireless, Ericsson, Microsoft, Ookla, Senza Fili, Telenor, and Verizon will address important topics of reachability, equity, and extensibility to build an effective solution that bridge the digital divide. These talks will provide thoughtful examination of the variety of technologies that enable quality access for digital inclusion, with the goal to have the word “underserved” removed from daily lexicon.
The full program can be found here
Registration can be found here
Together we can solve this
According to the World Economic Forum, some 3.5 billion people globally do not have reliable access to broadband. Ericsson has partnered with Giga, an initiative launched by UNICEF and ITU to connect every school to the Internet and every young person to information, opportunity and choice. Also, Ericsson co-founded the Connect To Learn initiative with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Millennium Promise to focus on delivering connectivity and ICT tools to enhance teaching and learning in unconnected, underprivileged and largely unrepresented communities. It is important to implement initiatives to provide affordable access and services that facilitate adoption and use of the digital economy to close the digital divide. We are proud to work for Ericsson, a company taking action, and to contribute to IEEE CQR’s focus on solving this problem.
[1] Chandra, S., Chang, A., Day, L., Fazlullah, A., Liu, J., McBride, L., Mudalige, T., Weiss, D., (2020). Closing the K–12 Digital Divide in the Age of Distance Learning. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media. Boston, Massachusetts, Boston Consulting Group
[2] The Lewis Latimer Plan for Digital Equity and Inclusion, a collaboration commissioned by the National Urban League
[3] Tech Tank Podcast “To Build Back Better, The US Needs A Digital Service Corps”, Nicol Turner Lee, Amanda Renteria, and Nick Sinai
[4] National Security and Telecommunications Advisory Committee, “NSTAC Letter to the President on Communications Resiliency,”October 2020, https://www.cisa.gov/publication/2020-nstac-publications
[5] Tom Sawanabori, CTIA “How Wireless Kept Americans Connected During COVID-19” (Briefing to the NSTAC Communications Resiliency Subcommittee, Arlington, VA, July 2, 2020).
[6] Michael Saperstein, USTelecom, “NSTAC Network Performance” (Briefing to the NSTAC Communications Resiliency Subcommittee, Arlington, VA, July 1, 2020).
[7] Bhaskar Chakravorti, Ajay Bhalla, Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi, HBR, “Which Economies Showed the Most Digital Progress in 2020?”, https://hbr.org/2020/12/which-economies-showed-the-most-digital-progress-in-2020
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