The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today unveiled Local Estimates of Internet Adoption (Project LEIA), an effort designed to improve the information on the digital divide, specifically inequities in broadband availability at the local level.
According to NTIA, better understanding internet adoption in counties and other communities will lead to better tracking of U.S. attempts to close the digital divide, which in turn will help with research and policy development.
The project continues a three-decade collaboration between NTIA and the U.S. Census to inform policymakers, researchers, advocates, and the general public about the state of computer and Internet use in this country.
Project LEIA is designed to help fill the gap in the agencies’ information, namely the lack of reliable, single-year estimates of internet adoption for rural areas. The effort will build on the data NTIA already has on the digital divide from national surveys. Advanced statistical modeling will help provide more granular adoption estimates than the agency currently has.
As the initial step in this effort, NTIA today released a set of experimental, single-year estimates of household wired internet adoption for every county in the county.
The agency is seeking public commentary on how Project LEIA should proceed. Comments are due in October.
Project LEIA is just one of many projects by a variety of entities seeking to address the digital divide and promote digital equity.
“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,” NTIA said in their announcement.
“Future work will include refining the initial model, and embarking on new experiments with more granular geographies and other important indicators of Internet adoption.”
