Russell Brandom and William Joel in an article for The Verge wrote,
“If broadband access was a problem before 2020, the pandemic turned it into a crisis. As everyday businesses moved online, city council meetings or court proceedings became near-inaccessible to anyone whose connection couldn’t support a Zoom call.”
But, who in America has access to broadband internet? As part of their ongoing work to improve software and service performance and security, Microsoft collected router speed data from individuals who accessed their cloud services. After aggregating and anonymizing these data, they made these data available publicly to help researchers and policymakers understand and improve problems related to broadband access.
The data in broadband.csv, collected by Microsoft (2021), give us much better insight as to the true broadband access (defined as internet download speeds of at least 25 Mbps) of Americans as, to date, most studies of broadband access have used data collated by the FCC that is based on individual Internet Service Providers’ descriptions of the areas they serve. To better contextualize this, the data have also been augmented with several county-level poverty and education indicators. The variables are:
state: State postal code
county: County name
fips: Five-digit Federal Information Processing Standards code which uniquely identified counties and county equivalents in the United States
rural_urban: Rural-urban continuum code
1: Metropolitan - Counties in metropolitan areas of 1 million population or more
2: Metropolitan - Counties in metropolitan areas of 250,000 to 1 million population
3: Metropolitan - Counties in metropolitan areas of fewer than 250,000 population
4: Nonmetropolitan - Urban population of 20,000 or more, adjacent to a metropolitan area
5: Nonmetropolitan - Urban population of 20,000 or more, not adjacent to a metropolitan area
6: Nonmetropolitan - Urban population of 2,500 to 19,999, adjacent to a metropolitan area
7: Nonmetropolitan - Urban population of 2,500 to 19,999, not adjacent to a metropolitan area
8: Nonmetropolitan - Completely rural or less than 2,500 urban population, adjacent to a metropolitan area
9: Nonmetropolitan - Completely rural or less than 2,500 urban population, not adjacent to a metropolitan area
metro: Classification of the county as metropolitan (metro) or nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) based on the rural-urban continuum code
fcc_availability: Proportion of people in the county with access to fixed terrestrial broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps as of the end of 2019 as measured by the FCC
microsoft_useage: Proportion of people in the county that use the internet at broadband speeds estimated by Microsoft
pct_poverty: Estimate of the percentage of people (of all ages) in the county living in poverty in 2019
median_income: Estimate of median household income in the county in 2019
lt_hs_2019: Percentage of the county with less than a high school diploma (2015–2019)
hs_2019: Percentage of the county with a high school diploma (2015–2019)
some_college_2019: Percentage of the county with some college or an associate’s degree (2015–2019)
college_2019: Percentage of the county with a bachelor’s degree, or higher (2015–2019)