Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Infrastructure in Rural America: Measuring the Digital Divide

Abstract

guishing features of the new economy. Telecommunications companies currently offer a wide range of products from caller ID and call forwarding, to video teleconferencing and high-speed Internet access. The number of telephone access lines in the United States, deployed by major carriers report annually to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), increased by 32% between 1990 and 2000, from 119.8 million to 157.6 million lines. Over the same period, the number of these lines equipped to provide ISDN-a highspeed, communications technology-increased from 13.6 million to 129.6 million, which represents a jump of 850% (Federal Communications Commission). ISDN, or Integrated Services Digital Network, is defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee as a network that provides end-to-end connectivity to support a wide range of services, including voice and nonvoice (Kessler, p. 2). ISDN technologies, applied to copper or fiber optic phone lines, allow for the transmission of multiple channels of information (e.g., voice, fax, data, and video) over a single wire. Depending on the specifics of the ISDN technology (e.g., type of phone line, characteristics of the central office switch, etc.), lines are upgraded to offer ISDN can transmit information at speeds ranging from 128 kilobits per second to over 150 megabits per second. Benefits of ISDN include highspeed data transmission, videoconferencing, enhanced ability to multi-task, and greater clarity in voice calls. Motivated by the increasingly advanced (digital) telecommunications services play in the new economy, this paper investigates the investments in ISDN infrastructure made by major telecommunications carriers in rural areas across the United States. Specifically, we examine the recent (1999) status of ISDN investments in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States, and we measure the digital in ISDN deployment between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas for each year between 1996 and 2000. Although, at the present time, other technologies are beginning to replace ISDN as the technology of choice, ISDN played an important role in bringing technology to telephone networks during the time period analyzed in the study (Greenstein and Spiller, 1996; Malecki and Boush). We believe the patterns of ISDN investment and the divide uncovered in the study may apply to other forms of telecommunications infrastructure available today and in the future.