Measuring the Digital Divide: A Neighborhood-Level Analysis of Racial Inequality in Internet Speed during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, internet access has been vital to ensuring individuals can work from home, attend online school and maintain contact with loved ones. While research has already shown that inequalities exist regarding who has access to the internet, less research has used actual internet speed test data to examine neighborhood inequalities in internet access, and even less research has explored trends related to this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a dataset containing over 100 million internet speed tests in the United States, we analyze neighborhood-level variation in internet speed. We find that neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents tend to have better download speeds but worse upload speeds. Notably, upload speeds are especially important for video communication, which massively proliferated during the pandemic. Further, upload speeds in Black neighborhoods have consistently fallen relative to white neighborhoods during the pandemic. This trend has substantial implications for racial inequality in the digital age.