NTIA - National Telecommunications and Information Administration

09/09/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/09/2024 08:49

Big Galaxy, Small Area Estimates: Introducing Project LEIA

By Rafi Goldberg, Senior Policy Advisor, Digital Equity

Today, we're excited to announce Local Estimates of Internet Adoption (Project LEIA), a new project to improve our understanding of the digital divide at a local level.

Improved and more timely estimates of Internet adoption in counties and other communities will lead to better tracking of our progress toward digital equity and fuel important research and policy development efforts.

NTIA and the U.S. Census Bureau have been working together for 30 years to inform policymakers, researchers, advocates, and the general public about the state of computer and Internet use in America. This vital partnership began with the 1994 introduction of the NTIA Internet Use Survey, and has grown over time through a range of joint efforts.

Our agencies have now launched an ambitious project aimed at filling a key gap in our knowledge of digital equity challenges: the lack of reliable, single-year estimates of Internet adoption for less populous geographies. Project LEIA builds on the data we already have from national surveys, combining survey estimates with other data known to correlate with Internet adoption, and uses advanced statistical modeling to produce more granular adoption estimates than would normally be possible. This has the potential to unlock a range of policy-informing research opportunities, while improving the ability of local communities to understand the challenges they face on the path to digital equity.

As a first step towards more granular data, today we are releasing the first-ever set of experimental, single-year estimates of household wired Internet adoption for every county in the United States. We are also seeking public comment on how Project LEIA should evolve and grow.

There are two key federal surveys on Internet use in the United States: the NTIA Internet Use Survey and the American Community Survey (ACS). Both surveys, while invaluable in many ways, are not ideal for conducting yearly program evaluation or studying the impacts of relatively sudden changes.

  • The sample size of NTIA's Internet Use Survey is not large enough to estimate Internet use beyond demographic groups and national and state levels.
  • The ACS has a much larger sample size, but still has limits. Right now, the only option to get Internet use data at the county-level for the entire country is to use the ACS five-year estimates, which aggregate five consecutive years of survey responses to yield sufficient sample sizes for every locality.

And so NTIA turned to Census Bureau experts in small area estimation to bring more granularity to our understanding of Internet use, and Project LEIA was born.

For this first phase of Project LEIA, the Census Bureau team produced an experimental model to estimate the proportion of households in each county that subscribed to wired Internet service in 2022. To accomplish this, Census used the direct survey estimates for wired Internet adoption from the 2022 ACS in combination with several variables related to subscribership levels, including each county's median household income, educational attainment level, and availability of fixed broadband services offering at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds. A complete feasibility report detailing the methodology used in this model, as well the experimental estimates themselves and related materials, can be found on the Census Bureau's website.

As we prepare for the next phase of this exciting initiative, NTIA has launched a Request for Comment, seeking suggestions for improvements to the initial experimental model, as well as ideas for how to prioritize future expansion of Project LEIA's scope. We welcome all input as we prepare for the next phase of Project LEIA; comments are due in October.

In addition to making any needed improvements to the methodology for estimating household adoption of wired Internet service at the county level, we will be exploring the potential for adding additional geographies such as census tracts, as well as other important Internet use metrics-including the more detailed information available from the NTIA Internet Use Survey.

While cautioning that these estimates are experimental, we have made them available on an interactive map to complement the data file provided by Census:

At its core, Project LEIA is a natural progression of the work NTIA and the Census Bureau have been undertaking for the last three decades: to enable evidence-based policymaking by understanding the state of computer and Internet use in America. We're looking forward to hearing your ideas for Project LEIA via our RFC. Future work will include refining the initial model, and embarking on new experiments with more granular geographies and other important indicators of Internet adoption.

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