Measuring the Digital Divide: A Neighborhood-Level Analysis of Racial Inequality in Internet Speed during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Stephen Rodriguez-Elliott and Karl Vachuska ()
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Stephen Rodriguez-Elliott: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53703, USA
Karl Vachuska: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53703, USA

Societies, 2023, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-11

Abstract: Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, internet access has been vital to ensuring individuals can work from home, attend online school and maintain contact with loved ones. While research has already shown that inequalities exist regarding who has access to the internet, less research has used actual internet speed test data to examine neighborhood inequalities in internet access, and even less research has explored trends related to this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a dataset containing over 100 million internet speed tests in the United States, we analyze neighborhood-level variation in internet speed. We find that neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents tend to have better download speeds but worse upload speeds. Notably, upload speeds are especially important for video communication, which massively proliferated during the pandemic. Further, upload speeds in Black neighborhoods have consistently fallen relative to white neighborhoods during the pandemic. This trend has substantial implications for racial inequality in the digital age.

Keywords: digital divide; internet speed; neighborhoods; COVID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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