Does access to internet promote innovation? A look at the U.S. broadband industry

Abstract

Access to the Internet is an essential determinant of innovation, which has received little attention in the literature. This paper emphasizes the role of Internet accessibility in lowering information costs and therefore boosting regional innovation activity. We construct a simple theoretical model to illustrate the positive impact of decreased discovery costs, proxied by the accessibility of the Internet, on innovation. To test this hypothesis, we exploit a county‐level data set in the U.S. and run three types of regression with and without instruments: OLS, negative binomial, and Poisson. Within each method, we employ four levels of download speeds. We find a positive relationship between the access to the Internet and the number of patents filed in that specific county. This effect is particularly strong in the case of access to download speeds of 10 Mbps. Our analysis suggests that access to the Internet lowers information disseminating costs and therefore encourages more patents filed in the county. The results also indicate that access to the Internet matters more than faster Internet speed for innovation. Policy implications for these results suggest that if there were a minimum Internet access initiative, there could potentially be a significant increase in innovation by the U.S.

Is Ultra-Broadband Enough? The Relationship between High-Speed Internet and Entrepreneurship in Brandenburg

“…Moreover, ultrahigh-speed broadband may have a limited effect, just on particular applications, as Kolko (2010) observed in the transition from dial-up internet to modern technologies that was mostly relevant to online music services and online shopping. Hence, though higher up-and download speeds may seem more attractive for both households and businesses, they are not essential for productivity (Mack and Faggian, 2013), innovative activity (Xu et al, 2019) or, as in our case, firm creation.…”

“…Still, some researchers could not confirm with a high level of confidence a pronounced enabling effect of ICTs (Haller and Lyons, 2015) because of the related factors of the presence of high-skilled employees (Mack and Faggian, 2013;Akerman et al, 2015) and larger investments into skills and strategic transformation (Colombo et al, 2013). Further studies connect ICTs and economic performance with innovative activities (Suryanegara et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2019), improvements in technologies and infrastructure (Koutroumpis, 2009), and higher employment rates and economic gains (Jorgenson and Motohashi, 2005;Lehr et al, 2006).…”

“…However, broadband cannot guarantee higher net entry rates or significant advantages for existing and new firms. Even though scholars have observed a positive impact of ICTs on entrepreneurship (McCoy et al, 2018) and the innovative capabilities of firms (Xu et al, 2019), the rule the faster, the better does not necessarily work in the context of economic benefits (Bai, 2017).…”

Do carbon emissions accelerate low-carbon innovation? Evidence from 285 Chinese prefecture-level cities

“…(3) INT describes the level of information development using the number of Internet users as a proxy. It is added because cities with higher information levels are proved to have stronger innovation vitality (Xu et al 2019 ). (4) OPEN refers to the degree of opening.…”

Hardware Acceleration for Container Migration on Resource-Constrained Platforms

“…The client devices are typically connected to access networks that are unreliable due to (device) mobility, subscriptions, and shared resources (e.g., best effort Ethernet services), which results in constrained network resources impacting the effective end-to-end bandwidth and latencies. To understand the impact of the network characteristics on the hardware acceleration, based on the standard broadband connectivity profiles [54], we consider 5 levels of bandwidth: 10, 50, 80, 200 Mbps, and 1 Gbps (i.e., default link speed) and 3 levels of latency: < 1, 50, and 100 ms in either direction (downlink and uplink) of the link. We use the Linux based Queuing Discipline (QDISC) and Hierarchal Token Bucket (HTB) [55], [56] to emulate the network traffic speeds and latencies on the client devices.…”