Opportunity Description

Access to digital information is an essential requirement for individuals to access critical services, such as to effectively participate in education and receive adequate healthcare. Since the Internet plays a central role in the transmission of information, differences in connection quality at schools and hospitals may lead to increased educational and healthcare inequality, especially between privileged and marginalized groups (that is, the digital divide). In this project, an undegraduate researcher will assist designing, collecting and analyzing Internet measurement campaigns that reveal the state of the digital divide across critical sectors in the United States, as well as reviewing relevant literature, and documenting and presenting the findings of their research.

In more detail, the central research goal of this project is the identification of disparities in access to a reliable Internet connection at anchor institutions: those that tend to be constrained to a specific geography, and which are crucial employers and service providers in local communities. These disparities may lead to corresponding inequities in access to an array of critical services. We aim at quantifying these disparities using a characterization of the end-to-end Internet infrastructure serving anchor institutions.

Our research is organized in three stages. First, we will identify the types of subscribers served by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S., with an emphasis on those serving institutions in education and healthcare. In the second stage we will measure the diversity of Internet routes to and from these ISPs and conduct a longitudinal study of their reachability. Using these findings, we will design and implement a novel Reliability Score, which quantifies the connection reliability of ISPs serving a given locality, and that can be compared across regions. In our final stage, we evaluate if ISPs with lower reliability are also more prone to suffering performance degradations (including service outages and lower connection speeds). We annotate each ISP with demographic information of the communities they serve using data from the Census Bureau. We then investigate if ISPs with lower reliability score tend to serve marginalized groups, for instance those with a lower household income.

This project will reveal disparities in connection quality that impacts communities across the U.S. These inequities are of interest to stakeholders including network operators trying to improve their coverage and service quality, organizational networks impacted by them, policymakers attempting to mitigate them, and other institutions working to bridge the digital divide.

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Duration

Fall

Compensation

Unpaid

Lab

Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute