FIVE-YEAR EQUITY & ACCESS BRIEF

The 2022–2026 Access Trajectory

Where digital access gaps closed, where they persist, and where they quietly widened
35,783 scans • 5 years • the post-pandemic access story

Mobile-carrier score gap

Executive summary

Between 2022 and 2026, online student populations saw their device-readiness baseline improve along nearly every measurable dimension. Average readiness scores rose from 77.8 to 81.9, low-readiness sessions (under 60/100) fell from 10.3% to 7.2%, and the 2020-era gap between students on mobile carrier networks and students on home broadband narrowed from 9.8 points to 2.5. For the first time in the dataset, median mobile-carrier download speeds now exceed those of home broadband.

The gap has migrated. Download parity is real. But upload speed, latency, and jitter remain structurally uneven. Mobile-carrier users in 2026 upload at roughly half the rate of broadband users and run 14 milliseconds slower in ping, a gap that has widened in absolute terms over the five-year window.

This brief describes what those five years show, why the pattern matters for the specific equity commitments online programs already hold, and what a current-day readiness scan typically surfaces in this new access environment.

Why isolate 2022–2026

2022 onward represents something closer to the steady state of the online student population. Volume normalized, scores stabilized, and the structural equity patterns that had been distorted by pandemic adoption became visible again against a backdrop of rapidly maturing consumer network infrastructure. That five-year window is what this brief analyzes.

The headline: the score gap largely closed

The average readiness-score gap between students whose sessions originated on a mobile carrier network and students on every other connection type.

A 7.3-point narrowing over five years. However, this is not the case in dimensions that matter most for online education delivery.

The hidden reversal: download parity, upload divergence

Median download speed on mobile-carrier connections rose 7.2x from 26.1 Mbps to 188.3 Mbps. By 2026, it exceeded broadband median.

The quieter persistent gap: latency

Latency is the round-trip delay measured in milliseconds, remaining structurally uneven.

The gap is narrowing, but it has plateaued in the 14–17 ms range.

The low-readiness tail is shrinking — but its composition is changing

What this means for online degree programs

For equity and access offices

Most students, on most connections, have enough download bandwidth for asynchronous coursework. The remaining access gap is concentrated in upload and latency — the dimensions that most directly affect synchronous participation.

For institutions whose equity commitments include full participation in live course elements

Three design implications follow directly from the 2022–2026 trajectory.

1. Course designs that rely heavily on live video presence as a participation measure disadvantage a specific and identifiable subset of students.
2. Proctoring platforms that flag connection instability produce systematic bias against the same subset.
3. Asynchronous alternatives and bandwidth-aware proctoring options are now mainstream access design in a population where 4–5% of students consistently show structural upload and latency disadvantages.

For student support operations

A readiness baseline run once per cohort can surface the multi-issue profile of a student efficiently before it manifests as multiple help-desk tickets and one unexplained withdrawal.

Five-year summary at a glance

Next step

A baseline readiness scan against the benchmarks in this brief typically takes two to three weeks to deploy and produces a population-level view of overall score distribution, connection-type mix, and the upload/latency profile affecting live course delivery.