In 2011 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed to use the Universal Service Fund to subsidize rural broadband Internet services. In 2019, the FCC estimated that only 73.6% of the rural population had access to broadband services at 25 Mbps in 2017, compared to 98.3% of the population in urban areas.https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-44A1.pdf However, many studies have contested FCC findings, claiming a greater number of Americans are without access to internet services at sufficient speeds. For instance, in 2019 Pew Research Center found that only about two-thirds of rural Americans claimed to have a broadband internet connection at home, and although the gap in mobile technology ownership between rural and urban adults has narrowed, rural adults remain less likely to own these devices.
