I got my Gig!

After thinking and writing about the benefits of fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) networks for a number of years, I’m happy to report that I’ve finally joined the small but growing population of U.S. households connected to the Internet via fiber networks delivering symmetrical gigabit speeds. I’m getting service from LightSpeed, a Lansing-based company deploying its network on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis (see this map for more details on the status of its network and service rollout).

The installation happened yesterday (the fiber drop was installed the day before). It went smoothly, with Jeremy and Chris connecting the drop to a fiber network interface in our basement and from there running CAT-5 cable to a router in our living room. As they worked, they patiently fielded the many questions I had and my long-winded comments about competitive dynamics, policy, etc.

Though my wife and I won’t be accessing the network on a regular basis until we move into our new house next week, I did have the pleasure of watching the Speedtest.net meter zoom up to the 1 Gbps range for both download and upload speeds at the end of the installation process. I also learned that while our fairly old laptops can reach this range when connected to the router via CAT-5 cable, their fairly ancient Network Interface Cards maxed out at around 100 Mbps in both directions when relying on Wi-Fi. But this was still by far the fastest speeds I’ve ever had in my home, especially in the upstream direction (the photo below shows Jeremy and Chris demonstrating speeds in the 500 Mbps range via a Wi-Fi connection on their newer-generation laptop, after hitting gigabit speeds via a hardwire connection to the router).

LightSpeed’s monthly price for symmetrical gigabit service is normally $70 (which I believe is also what Google charges in its Google Fiber cities). As an “early adopter,” however, I’m paying only $49 a month, a price that’s guaranteed for two years. Though this price no doubt takes a bite out of LightSpeed’s margin for its “early adopter” customers, it’s likely to help them capture market share as they build out their network. And in a high-fixed cost business like this, penetration is key to both short-term and long-term financial health.

One of the things that strikes me about LightSpeed is that it is not offering the “triple-play” bundle that has been the focus of cable/telco competition for many years. Instead, their value proposition is pretty simple: you get attractively-priced access to the Internet at blazingly fast symmetrical gigabit speeds (hopefully with the kind of reliability fiber can deliver but is much harder to match with the fiber-copper hybrid networks still mainly used by incumbent telcos and cablecos). You then have free rein to make (and change) the online services and devices you use to access the “voice” and “video” applications we once knew as “telephone” and “television.”

I’d love to do a survey of homes in areas served by LightSpeed to get a sense of who (and why and how many) are signing up for the company’s service, and what their experience is like. The obvious (and probably true) speculation would be that it’s mainly younger cohorts (e.g., Millennials), which research has shown account for a disproportionate share of the (cable and wireline telephone) cord-cutter population. That being said, I wonder how many older households, like my own, will jump at the chance to forego bundles loaded with things we don’t want (including extra fees for set-top rentals, etc.) and, instead, to simply get connected to a fast reliable network and then decide—-independent of the business arrangement we have with our network access provider—how best to use that network to support our needs and desires for communication, information, entertainment, commerce, etc.

I also wonder the extent to which the availability in a community of these “simple but super-fast” connectivity offerings will push incumbent providers away from their increasingly artificial “siloing-then-bundling” of services. There are already signs that this is taking place, though still on a modest and incremental scale.

My own view is that the longstanding focus on multiservice network operator-controlled bundles will continue to erode, especially to the extent that “simply super-fast access” options like LightSpeed expand their footprint. Among the other factors I see as supporting this shift are: the proliferation and increased penetration of online content and services, including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and online-only options from longtime cable TV anchor service HBO; the increasing penetration and capabilities of smartphones, tablets and other access devices not (or at least less) controlled by network operators and; the ongoing shift in demographics favoring “fast affordable connectivity + apps of my choosing” vs. “a limited selection of bundled options offered by my network operator.”

Though not much can be predicted based on a sample of one, what I can say at this point is that I look forward to my own household’s transition down this road, which combines much faster and more reliable, symmetrical and affordable network access with expanded freedom of choice. And, as both a customer and industry observer, I hope that the increasingly healthy competitive environment emerging in the Lansing area remains so, and breeds increased innovation, investment and consumer choice.

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: competition fiber networks Lansing LightSpeed