ABSTRACT
Concern over the potential need to redefine universal service to account for Internet-related services and other combinations of communication and computing motivates this study of the geographic spread of commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), the leading suppliers of Internet access in the United States. We characterize the location of 54,000 points of presence (POPs), local phone numbers offered by commercial ISPs, in the spring of 1998. Markets differ widely in their structure, from competitive to unserved. More than 92% of the U.S. population has easy access to a competitive commercial Internet access market, while less than 5% of the U.S. population has costly access.
