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 Department and co-author of a paper presented in August at conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM). “If you look at the data the regulators had on paper, the program looked like a great success, which amounts to something like six million addresses served and everybody compliant with what the FCC’s rate and service quality requirements were,” he continued. “But when we started digging in, we realized that was not the case, and people are actually not receiving service as is being certified by the ISPs.”

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