Deloitte provides three reasons that the U.S. digital divide remains
Following the digital divide wake-up call prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reveal of President Joe Biden’s sweeping infrastructure plan, RCR Wireless News spoke with Deloitte Consulting’s Chief Cloud Strategy Officer David Linthicum and Principal Jack Fritz to discuss the current state of the divide and how advanced technologies like public clouds, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), might be able to help.
Q: What are some of the biggest hurdles that remain to overcoming the digital divide?
Fritz: Deloitte recently published a study on the digital divide. We found that wireline and wireless carriers in the U.S., coupled with public spending, have really done well investing in our communications infrastructure.
Ultimately, the gap remains for a few reasons:
(1) Because internet performance expectations and needs continue to increase. As we state in the paper, 2% of total U.S. homes lack access to at least 10 Mbps downstream internet and 4% lack access to 25 Mbps downstream internet. But that gap grows with the need for higher and higher speed connections.
(2) Our numbers are anchored on the FCC broadband definition, but in larger households, they may feel as though they are “left behind” because they can’t all work and learn simultaneously from home. By contrast, one person living with 10 Mbps downstream/1 Mbps upstream may think they aren’t left behind since they can do everything they want to do.
(3) In rural areas, the U.S. has a unique challenge for broadband deployment versus other countries. Even though the aggregate population density of the U.S. is higher than other countries, our population is more dispersed. In other words, countries with much lower density than the U.S. (e.g. Canada, Australia) have more geographically concentrated populations.
Q: At this point, many have heard about how 5G will impact the digital divide, but can you tell me more about cloud’s role?
Linthicum: Public clouds, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), are potentially the great equalizers for new and growing small businesses, including home-based businesses. As communities come on-line, they can leverage their new or improved internet connectivity to access cloud services in support of required small business services such as automated accounting, payroll, marketing analytics, and e-commerce. This means that it’s no longer requiring that small businesses acquire expensive hardware and software in support of business automation. They can leverage the cloud for what they need, when they need it and only pay for what they use. In essence, it allows them to punch above their weight.
Q: What are some of the best ways for an organization that isn’t particularly familiar with technology, like a school, to go about learning more about and implementing advanced technolgy?
Linthicum: You’ll find that many high-tech companies will work with communities, including public schools and colleges, providing resources such as the technology itself, funding and even educators. This does a few things including minimizing the investment for the schools that often have limited budgets. Also, it allows for initial successes to prove that advanced tech training is part of all education. This education will drive higher salaries, and thus, tax dollars coming back into the community.
Q: How important do you think remote learning and working will continue to be as the pandemic comes to an end?
Fritz: Remote learning has played an increasingly important role in education, but in the pandemic has become critical to how people learn. Remote learning provides several benefits that will likely support models beyond the pandemic, from the ability to learn at your own pace to having access to materials at lower or no cost relative to traditional classroom learning. I really think that some form of remote learning is likely to persist moving forward. This includes local schools that may use a hybrid approach, and colleges and universities that will pass out more degrees to students who have never set foot on the campus.
Q: Because people no longer have to go into a physical office and because social distancing has become the norm, people have been fleeing cities for more rural locations. Has the conversation around rural connectivity shifted? Is it a positive for addressing the digital divide?
Fritz: As remote work continues, there are opportunities for rural and underserved communities to attract those workers leaving cities and potentially retain others who may have previously left for opportunities in urban areas, so it does seem like broadband availability is a tide that raises all ships. We quantified some of the potential economic impact of broadband on job growth in our recent study, finding that a 10-percentage-point increase in broadband availability in 2014 would have resulted in more than 875,000 additional U.S. jobs and $186 billion more in economic output in 2019. That is an average of 175,000 jobs and $37.2 billion in output per year.
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