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1. Connecting in Crisis: Investigating Equitable Community Internet Access in the US During the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3677326  

   McDonald, Nora; Stamato, Lydia; Hamidi, Foad (July 2024, ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies)

   Although internet access and affordability are increasingly at the center of policy decisions around issues of the “digital divide” in the US, the complex nature of usage as it relates to structural inequality is not well-understood. We partnered with Project Waves, a community internet provider, to set up connectivity across the urban landscape of a city in the Eastern United States to study factors that impact the rollout of affordable broadband internet connectivity to low-income communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization endeavored to meet structural challenges, provide community support for adoption, and stave off attendant privacy concerns. We present three dimensions of equitable use prioritized by the community internet provider: safety from COVID-19 through social distancing enabled by remote access, trusted connectivity, and private internet access. We use employee interviews and a phone survey of internet recipients to investigate how the provider prioritized these dimensions and who uses their service. 

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2. Characterizing Service Provider Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978303072582-2  

   Shinan Liu, Paul Schmitt (January 2021, Passive and Active Measurement Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in dramatic changes to the daily habits of billions of people. Users increasingly have to rely on home broadband Internet access for work, education, and other activities. These changes have resulted in corresponding changes to Internet traffic patterns. This paper aims to characterize the effects of these changes with respect to Internet service providers in the United States. We study three questions: (1) How did traffic demands change in the United States as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?; (2) What effects have these changes had on Internet performance?; (3) How did service providers respond to these changes? We study these questions using data from a diverse collection of sources. Our analysis of interconnection data for two large ISPs in the United States shows a 30–60% increase in peak traffic rates in the first quarter of 2020. In particular, we observe traffic downstream peak volumes for a major ISP increase of 13–20% while upstream peaks increased by more than 30%. Further, we observe significant variation in performance across ISPs in conjunction with the traffic volume shifts, with evident latency increases after stay-at-home orders were issued, followed by a stabilization of traffic after April. Finally, we observe that in response to changes in usage, ISPs have aggressively augmented capacity at interconnects, at more than twice the rate of normal capacity augmentation. Similarly, video conferencing applications have increased their network footprint, more than doubling their advertised IP address space 

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3. Mapping the Digital Divide: Before, During, and After COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3786158  

   Bronzino, Francesco; Feamster, Nick; Liu, Shinan; Saxon, James; Schmitt, Paul (January 2021, SSRN Electronic Journal)

   null (Ed.)

   The digital divide—and, in particular, the homework gap— have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, laying bare not only the inequities in broadband Internet access but also how these inequities ultimately affect citizens’ ability to learn, work, and play. Addressing these inequities ultimately requires having holistic, “full stack” data on the nature of the gaps in infrastructure and uptake—from the physical infrastructure (e.g., fiber, cable) to speed and application performance to affordability and neighborhood effects that ultimately affect whether a technology is adopted. This paper surveys how various existing datasets can (and cannot) shed light on these gaps, the limitations of these datasets, what we know from existing data about how the Internet responded to shifts in traffic during COVID-19, and—importantly for the future—what data we need to better understand these problems moving forward and how the research community, policymakers, and the public might gain access to various data. Keywords: digital divide,iInternet, mapping, performance 

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4. Mending the Fabric: the Contentious, Collaborative Work of Repairing Broadband Maps

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3687003  

   Palacios_Abad, Beatriz; Belding, Elizabeth; Vigil-Hayes, Morgan; Zegura, Ellen (November 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   In 2011, the United Nations declared Internet access to be a basic human right. Achieving universal Internet access has been a longstanding goal of governments around the world. In the United States (US), provision depends primarily on decisions made by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) driven essentially by commercial market concerns. To encourage deployment in underserved regions, the US federal government has recently allocated unprecedented funding, with distributions guided by the information in broadband maps, spatial representations of current Internet access and quality published by the Federal Communication Commission. Yet, these maps are known to be inaccurate, especially for populations that are marginalized, such as tribal and rural residents. We are interested in the collaborative and contentious efforts to repair the data contained in broadband maps, and particularly by the efforts of citizen groups and local government to counter claims made by ISPs. In this paper, we study these efforts via interviews of 14 individuals involved in various local and regional roles, in policy, IT, advocacy, and research. We draw upon frameworks of repair and of data activism to ask who does this work and why; what tangible and intangible tools are brought to bear; and how the structural context simultaneously empowers and burdens repair workers. In doing so, we make three contributions: (i) we critique the process and system for broadband map repair for the burdens it places on historically marginalized groups to demonstrate how they have been left out of expansion and how their experiences are otherwise silent in official records; (ii) we bring together analytical concepts from repair and data arenas to examine repair work that is substantially shaped by socio, political, and economic context; and (iii) we illustrate how viewing broadband data workers as activists reveals the inadequacy of current tools and the opportunity for better support for their long-term, contextualized, and mediated efforts. 

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5. Youth invisible work: the sociocultural and collaborative processes of online search and brokering between adolescents and English-language learning families

   https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-01-2022-0004  

   Yip, Jason; Roldan, Wendy; Gonzalez, Carmen; Pina, Laura R.; Ruiz, Maria; Vanegas, Paola (July 2022, Information and Learning Sciences)

   This study aims to investigate the collaboration processes of immigrant families as they search for online information together. Immigrant English-language learning adults of lower socioeconomic status often work collaboratively with their children to search the internet. Family members rely on each other’s language and digital literacy skills in this collaborative process known as online search and brokering (OSB). While previous work has identified ecological factors that impact OSB, research has not yet distilled the specific learning processes behind such collaborations. Design/methodology/approach: For this study, the authors adhere to practices of a case study examination. This study’s participants included parents, grandparents and children aged 10–17 years. Most adults were born in Mexico, did not have a college-degree, worked in service industries and represented a lower-SES population. This study conducted two to three separate in-home family visits per family with interviews and online search tasks. Findings: From a case study analysis of three families, this paper explores the funds of knowledge, resilience, ecological support and challenges that children and parents face, as they engage in collaborative OSB experiences. This study demonstrates how in-home computer-supported collaborative processes are often informal, social, emotional and highly relevant to solving information challenges. Research limitations/implications: An intergenerational OSB process is different from collaborative online information problem-solving that happens between classroom peers or coworkers. This study’s research shows how both parents and children draw on their funds of knowledge, resilience and ecological support systems when they search collaboratively, with and for their family members, to problem solve. This is a case study of three families working in collaboration with each other. This case study informs analytical generalizations and theory-building rather than statistical generalizations about families. Practical implications: Designers need to recognize that children and youth are using the same tools as adults to seek high-level critical information. This study’s model suggests that if parents and children are negotiating information seeking with the same technology tools but different funds of knowledge, experience levels and skills, the presentation of information (e.g. online search results, information visualizations) needs to accommodate different levels of understanding. This study recommends designers work closely with marginalized communities through participatory design methods to better understand how interfaces and visuals can help accommodate youth invisible work. Social implications: The authors have demonstrated in this study that learning and engaging in family online searching is not only vital to the development of individual and digital literacy skills, it is a part of family learning. While community services, libraries and schools have a responsibility to support individual digital and information literacy development, this study’s model highlights the need to recognize funds of knowledge, family resiliency and asset-based learning. Schools and teachers should identify and harness youth invisible work as a form of learning at home. The authors believe educators can do this by highlighting the importance of information problem solving in homes and youth in their families. Libraries and community centers also play a critical role in supporting parents and adults for technical assistance (e.g. WiFi access) and information resources. Originality/value: This study’s work indicates new conditions fostering productive joint media engagement (JME) around OSB. This study contributes a generative understanding that promotes studying and designing for JME, where family responsibility is the focus. 

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