When the Internet Isn’t Equal: My Journey Into Broadband Equity Research

I grew up in Quincy, Florida, a small rural town where household incomes lagged behind the state and national averages. Internet access was almost nonexistent. Options were slow, expensive, and unreliable, if available at all.

That mattered more than just not being able to stream videos. It meant that kids couldn’t fully participate in school assignments, families had fewer job opportunities, limited access to information and healthcare, and staying connected felt like a privilege rather than a right.

Even today, Quincy continues to struggle with limited broadband options. That reality stuck with me, and it became the spark that drove me to study technology innovation more deeply.

When I started my PhD program at National University, I enrolled in TIM-7001: Principles of Technology Innovation Management. From the start, I knew broadband would be my primary focus.

This wasn’t an abstract academic exercise. It was personal. I had lived the problem, and now I wanted to understand it in a structured, research-driven way.

Over eight assignments, I connected my Quincy story to broader questions about equity, governance, and innovation:

• I started by framing broadband as critical infrastructure and exploring it through three philosophical lenses:

  • Technological Utopianism: the belief that broadband can drive equality, economic growth, and innovation.

  • Technological Dystopianism: the view that unchecked connectivity can widen inequality, enable surveillance, and introduce new risks.

  • Technological Neutrality: the idea that broadband itself isn’t good or bad; outcomes depend on governance and use.

• Next, I examined smart cities through case studies, applying Kehler’s Human-Centered AI Framework to test whether design choices prioritized people or profits. This helped me analyze risks like surveillance creep, digital redlining, and loss of civic trust.

• From there, I applied the Digital Equity Lens, which categorizes broadband into three measurable pillars: availability, affordability, and adoption. This framework kept equity at the center of my analysis and forced me to ask: who is being left out?

• I paired that with the NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF), a lifecycle model with seven steps (prepare, categorize, select, implement, assess, authorize, monitor). It provided a structured way to secure broadband systems against threats while protecting privacy.

• Midway through the course, I layered in Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction Theory, which describes how new technologies disrupt and replace older ones. In broadband, this meant that fiber and wireless systems were overtaking outdated copper networks, and with that, new opportunities for inclusion, but also new governance challenges.

Together, these theories and frameworks became the backbone of my later work.

• They informed me about the Signature Assignment, where I combined governance models, such as COBIT (IT governance and accountability) and ITIL 4 (service management and continuity), with equity and security frameworks to propose strategies for managing technology and innovation in global organizations.

• Finally, they shaped the Final Presentation, where I looked forward, predicting how AI, big data, and automation will redefine broadband equity, governance, and the future of work.

By the end, the research didn’t just explain broadband’s role in smart cities; it also demonstrated its impact on various aspects of urban life. It showed how multiple theories, spanning economics, ethics, and cybersecurity, must collaborate to guide innovation responsibly.

The proudest moment came when my professor encouraged me to publish my first paper on SSRN. What started as an assignment about broadband as critical infrastructure turned into my first piece of publicly available research.

For someone who grew up in a town where internet access was a constant barrier, putting that work into a global academic conversation was a full-circle moment.

👉 You can read my work here on SSRN.

For me, this research isn’t just about technology. It’s about fairness. It’s about whether kids growing up in towns like Quincy will have the same opportunities as kids in big cities.

Broadband isn’t a luxury; it’s the foundation of modern life. And my first PhD course reminded me of something simple but powerful: Innovation only matters when it serves people.