May Media Brief Staff Picks - Andrew Rosenthal

For this month, I chose two articles, which were found from searching “Internet Infrastructure in Philadelphia '' in Google News. The first article, The Infrastructure Supporting the Deployment of 5G is Critical for Digital Equity was chosen because, even though I have a large amount of knowledge about broadband infrastructure in Philadelphia, I had little knowledge of 5G. I was expecting the article to discuss plans for 5G in the Philadelphia area, and the benefits of it, which it did. The article was written by Martin K. Torrence, a guest writer. Before the article, it states “This is a guest post by St. Martin K. Torrence, government affairs manager at Crown Castle.” Upon searching the name, I found that Crown Castle was a real estate investment trust involved in communications infrastructure. It immediately clicked with me that I was reading sponsored content, or at the very least, content meant to promote Crown Castle’s 5G plan. For the sake of transparency, I’ll admit my knowledge of how 5G actually works, who builds the towers, etc. is limited. 5G to me seems like a marketing scheme more than anything, but the article did bring up one good point.

PHLconnectEd offered broadband to those who were able to get a router in their house, and a T-Mobile hotspot to those who did not. One of my articles from a while back discussed that these hotspots were glitchy at best, and nonfunctioning at worst. 5G allows those without homes or the ability to have a router/modem in their house to connect to high speed internet. I would love to see a breakdown of who is using the T-Mobile hotspots vs Comcast broadband. 

    On the subject of data, my next article The Digital Divide: How Philadelphia Area Compares In Internet Usage is a report presenting data collected by Microsoft. There’s not much analytical content to the article, but it does offer each zip code and the % that have broadband internet speeds (based on Microsoft's data). This is helpful to me, and honestly leads me to believe that we should ask questions about internet speeds in our survey data (though there are certainly challenges to that). With Comcast’s growth last year, it will be interesting to see how they adapt to 5G if it ends up being a communications game changer as some expect it to be.

Sources

Martin K. Torrence, 31 May 2021, "The infrastructure supporting the deployment of 5G is critical for digital equity", contributed by Andrew Rosenthal and Andrew Rosenthal, The Energy Rights Project, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 30 May 2021, accessed 2 June 2021.

Philadelphia, PA Patch. “The Digital Divide: How Philadelphia Area Compares In Internet Usage,” May 18, 2021. https://patch.com/pennsylvania/philadelphia/digital-divide-how-philadelp....