Abstract

There are concerns across government, industry, and academia over the inadequacies of data on broadband Internet connections. These inadequacies are important to consider because government policies and regulations, industry strategies, and scholarly research can be impacted by inaccurate or distorted data. Given that there are ongoing discussions about policy initiatives to improve these data, this article sets out to critically review publicly available data, identify important limitations of these data, and profile studies that have used these data successfully. In this review, the dynamic nature of broadband data will be discussed and the tradeoffs of pursuing further investments to create better databases evaluated. This evaluation suggests a more fruitful research path would be to recognize and work around existing data drawbacks, using the studies profiled in this article as examples, to explore a multitude of issues related to broadband availability, adoption, and use.

摘要

宽带互联网连接数据的不足，引起了政府，行业和学术界的广泛关注。这些不足之处必须加以考虑，因为政府政策和法规，行业策略以及学术研究可能会受到不正确或失真的数据的影响。鉴于目前正在进行有关改善这些数据的政策措施的讨论，因此本文着眼于严格审查可公开获得的数据，确定这些数据的重要局限性，并对成功使用这些数据的情况进行研究。在本文中，将讨论宽带数据的动态性质，并评估寻求进一步投资以创建更好的数据库的权衡。这项评估表明，一条更富有成果的研究途径将是发现并解决现有数据缺陷，