More than two million Pennsylvanians do not have access to reliable, high-speed internet—a service that former Governor Tom Wolf once called “as essential today as electricity and water.”
“We’re at a critical juncture with regard to the internet here in the United States,” says David Elliot Berman, postdoctoral fellow at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Sixty-five billion dollars is going to be invested in the country’s internet infrastructure through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and at least $1.2 billion of it is going to Pennsylvania.”
Berman is a member of the Pennsylvania Broadband Research (PBR) Institute, a collaboration between the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center at the Annenberg School and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University to research and promote ways to get Pennsylvanians—and other Americans—online.
For the past 10 months, Berman has worked with the Philly Community Wireless project, which uses a network of antennas and Wi-Fi access points to connect homes in North Philadelphia to free, community-operated broadband.
“That work gave me a renewed appreciation for how we can realize a more democratic internet at the level of infrastructure,” he says, “not just from the policy world, but through actually installing access to the internet.”
He is studying nontraditional internet providers that are successfully providing high-speed, low-cost internet access in the United States, like public broadband and community wireless networks. The ultimate goal of the PBR Institute is to determine a way to establish fast, reliable, and affordable access to the internet to everyone in the United States. The digital divide is vast, but the members hope to close it, through research, advocacy, and work with local communities.
This story is by Hailey Reissman. Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.