SAI: Data-Driven Governance for Broadband Infrastructure

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

The United States is at the start of a massive investment in the nation’s broadband infrastructure. A major focus of this investment is on improving equity in broadband access, adoption, and use. To inform the effort, reliable data are needed to identify areas of the nation that are underserved or unserved.

A major challenge is that existing data and performance metrics are not well-suited to drawing conclusions about how to target new broadband investments to ensure that all Americans are connected to high-speed broadband at a price they can afford. This project responds to the challenge by developing and validating new sampling and modeling approaches for measuring broadband performance at the scale of meaningful human geographies, such as blocks, neighborhoods, villages, communities, townships, and cities.

For these new approaches to be of use and to inform policy implementation requires a better understanding of how governance processes that incorporate data as a source of knowledge unfold and take root in practice. This project therefore also identifies the factors that constrain or enable the adoption of novel Internet measurement data. The research informs ongoing broadband investment efforts and empowers broadband governance stakeholders with the knowledge and tools to gather their own longitudinal Internet performance data.

Working in six diverse communities, this project examines how the provision of high-quality data on Internet performance to local broadband stakeholders affects decision-making on deployment of broadband infrastructure investments. Local stakeholders work with the research team to deploy new Internet measurement software to gather continuous measurements on Internet performance from households in each community.

This work is complemented by a qualitative research study, combining interviews and participant-observation, to understand how broadband stakeholders respond to this new information in their decision-making. The framework developed by this project accounts for the values, interests, and fears embedded in stakeholder organizations, including government agencies, advocacy organizations, community groups, and Internet Service Providers.

By developing new sources of Internet measurement data and achieving a better understanding of how those data are best incorporated into policy implementation decisions, the national investment in broadband infrastructure is more likely to reach the places where it is most needed. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.