Federal broadband subsidies boosted rural internet, but service faded once funding ended, researchers find
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Image Science + Technology September 25, 2024 Federal broadband subsidies boosted rural internet, but service faded once funding ended, researchers find Sonia Fernandez A federal multibillion-dollar effort that subsidized internet service providers to bring broadband to underserved areas has provided much-needed high-speed internet to some of the country’s remote and rural areas. However, according to UC Santa Barbara researchers, once the federal subsidies ended, so did much of the service. “We wanted to study how effective such an approach of directly subsidizing the ISPs to operate as regulated monopolies is in these rural areas, versus the ones that are served by regular monopolies, or compared to competitive markets,” said Arpit Gupta, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Computer Science...