Brookings on broadband

The Brookings Institution released an attention-grabbing report today entitled The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data.

The far-reaching study is authored by Robert W. Crandall, William Lehr, and Robert E. Litan; the analysis seeks to explore what “is increasingly viewed as essential infrastructure for our global information economy.”

Brookings starts with the familiar yet again startling numbers that say that in year 2000, there were only 4.1 million broadband lines in the United States with 3.2 million of these residential lines. In 2006, those statistics had ballooned to 53.5 million and 49 million, respectively. Including wireless connections, total U.S. broadband lines actually rose to more than 64.6 million lines.

The study provides new estimates of the effects of broadband penetration on both output and employment, in the aggregate and by sector, using state level data. FCC data on broadband penetration for the lower 48 states over the 2003-2005 period was employed.