To accompany the sweeping updates that the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab made in May 2024 to the New York State Digital Equity Portal, we are pleased to release a new fact sheet that documents recent progress on, and remaining barriers to, achieving digital equity in NYS. Drawing on data from the Digital Equity Portal, the fact sheet shows that:

1. Nearly a quarter-million households still lack any type of high-speed Internet connection.
2. An additional ~810,000 households can only access the Internet through cellular data plans, bringing the total number of potentially “underconnected” households to more than 1.5 million.
3. There is reason to believe that insufficient affordable access to multiple and diverse types of computing devices is keeping many households “underconnected” to broadband Internet.
4. Lack of at-home broadband subscriptions is a problem with multiple dimensions – including but not limited to lack of infrastructure, too few providers, and unaffordable prices for local populations – that cut across the rural-urban gradient.
5. Households headed by Black or African American and Hispanic or Latinx New Yorkers continue to have the lowest rates of broadband take up, and the groups’ take up rates are falling farther behind statewide averages.
6. And income still appears to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a household can access a broadband Internet subscription.

Read the fact sheet below, or access it on the NYS Digital Equity Portal website here.