Microsoft released a new Digital Equity Data Dashboard to help create better understanding of the economic opportunity gaps in towns, cities and neighborhoods across the country. The new tool was developed by the company’s Chief Data Science Officer Juan Lavista Ferres and the Microsoft AI for Good Lab.
It aggregates public data from the Census Bureau, FCC, BroadbandNow and Microsoft’s own Broadband Usage Data. It goes census tract-by-census tract, examining 20 different indicators of digital equity – such as broadband access, usage, education and poverty rates. It created what Microsoft Airband Initiative GM Vickie Robinson calls “one of the most complete pictures of digital equity in these areas to date.”
The map, what Microsoft calls a “dashboard,” comes at a time when the government is making large amounts of deployment funding available such as the Infrastructure Law, Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, the Digital Equity Act and others. The map was created with the “best data possible” as a resource to help policymakers identify key places and communities within their state so they can direct funding and programmatic investments, says Robinson in a blog.
She uses Ferry County, WA, as an example, “where the FCC claims that only 0.4% of households lack access to broadband, which by itself provides a bright view of the county’s digital opportunity. But our dashboard shows that 97 percent of the county aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds.” More than a third of these households don’t have a desktop or laptop to use the broadband available to them, according to Robinson.
The dashboard offers the opportunity to examine a city neighborhood-by-neighborhood, helping identify which areas most urgently need digital equity investments, notes Robinson. Using her former Lindsay Heights neighborhood in Milwaukee, WI as an example, she says: “as much as 65 percent, almost two-thirds, of households don’t have a desktop or laptop, and more than 50 percent, don’t have a broadband subscription. Yet, just to the southeast, only 14 percent of households don’t have a desktop or laptop and 16 percent don’t have a broadband connection, a huge difference in just a few miles. By analyzing and illustrating the data at this deep level, lawmakers can now better identify where to focus time and resources to close these inequity gaps.”
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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