AI for Good

Chapter 19Broadband Connectivity

—Mayana Pereira, Amit Misra, and Allen Kim

Executive Summary

Broadband connectivity is critical to the functioning of today's economy, directly impacting gross domestic product in an era of rapid expansion of the digital economy. Highlighting the importance of broadband connectivity, the COVID-19 guidelines of social distancing and the rapid uptake of telehealth services made Internet connectivity necessary for everyday activities such as work, learning, healthcare, and staying in touch with family and friends. To help policymakers and interested organizations better understand broadband connectivity and markets where connectivity might be lacking, we sought to introduce a publicly available Broadband Coverage dataset that reports broadband coverage percentages for the United States at the ZIP Code level. Critical to this release was using differential privacy methods that guarantee that the privacy of individual households is preserved. Further, we calculated error ranges estimates, so that the expected error that is introduced by using differential privacy methods is also available at the ZIP Code level. Here, we describe our error range calculation method and show that this additional data metric does not induce any privacy loss.

Why Is This Important?

Every day our world becomes a little more digital. But reaping the benefits of this digital world—pursuing new educational opportunities through distance learning, feeding the world ...