Internet access, cost challenging
Providers able to meet increased demand, but some Conn. residents left behind
Even with a sharp increase in demand due to a surge in online meetings and virtual classes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Connecticut’s major internet providers say they are having no issues with bandwidth or capacity. Whether consumers can afford the service they now must depend on for education and employment, however, can vary.
“Despite significant traffic increases, our network is performing very well overall and meeting the needs of remote workers and students learning from home,” said Jeff Lavery, spokesman for Cox Communications. “If we see the network reach or exceed utilization thresholds, we will accelerate network upgrade plans in the impacted areas.”
Other major providers such as Comcast and Frontier also say they have not experienced any significant service problems.
“During COVID-19, network traffic spiked more than 30 percent as people rapidly transitioned to working and learning from home,” Comcast spokeswoman Kristen Roberts said. “Comcast’s network continued to deliver fast speeds, even under the heaviest usage, and even in the areas most severely affected by COVID-19.”
That 30 percent increase in demand closely mirrors the national trend, according to the NCTA, the principal trade association for the U.S. cable industry.
BroadbandNow, a website that helps consumers find and compare internet service providers, says Connecticut overall has the 10thbest broadband internet connection and download speed in the nation.
While more than 90 percent of state residents have access to highspeed internet, there are thousands of residents who do not. According to BroadbandNow, about 7,000 residents do not have any wired internet providers offering services where they live. About 32,000 residents lack access to high-speed broadband internet. Another 165,000 residents have access to only one wired provider, leaving them no competitive options to switch.
Those underserved areas of the state are mainly concentrated in the Northwest and Northeast corners, said Burt Cohen, broadband policy coordinator in the state’s Office of Consumer Counsel.
Cohen noted that affordability
demand for pricey personal drones as their novelty wore off. Camera-maker GoPro abandoned its drone business in 2018 and other companies have struggled to build affordable devices.
“Once you get one, it’s not real clear what you do with it as a consumer,” said tech industry analyst William Stofega of IDC.
Stofega said that’s one reason why drone companies are tailoring their products for government or commercial tasks such as inspecting pipelines, monitoring crops or police surveillance. Skydio last year hired a retired Southern California police captain to pitch its drones to law enforcement.
DJI has made a push to counter the security concerns, most recently with a Wednesday announcement that it will enable an internet “kill switch” on more drones so that commercial and government users can halt data transmission on sensitive flying missions. Its products, while offlimits to some federal agencies, are still favored by many local and regional governments in the U.S.
“If an enemy of the United States wants to see me looking for someone on a mountain, so be it,” said Kyle Nordfors, drone team coordinator for the mostly volunteer search-and-rescue crew of Weber County, Utah. “They can see how we take care of our own.”
Nordfors said he sometimes uses a Skydio drone to scout a riverbed or for other daytime tasks that require the drone to fly by itself without hitting a tree. Skydio, founded by engineers who worked on Google’s delivery drone venture Wing, employs computer vision rather than satellitebased GPS to move its drones around — enabling them to “see” and autonomously navigate around obstacles.
But mostly Nordfors uses a remote-controlled DJI drone — such as the one that helped his team track down a lost teenager this
summer in Waterfall Canyon, a rugged hiking area north of Salt Lake City. “He was so thrilled,” Nordfors said of the 19-year-old. “He was jumping up and down.“
At the Clovis Police Department in California’s Central Valley, officers also have a choice of drones they can dispatch to be a “first responder” at crime scenes — at least before the haze of nearby forest fires temporarily grounded them.
The department doesn’t have its own helicopter, but officers can get their eyes and ears out to a scene quickly by piloting the drones from atop a roof near the city’s center, said Clovis police Lt. James Munro. He said the department typically uses its fleet of about a dozen DJI drones because of their durability and infrared night vision, but is also experimenting with a Skydio drone because of its ability to home in on an officer or suspect.
“You can put a little dot on the person and the drone will follow them,” Munro said.
Kumar, the Penn engineering dean who also founded a startup that sends drones into mines, said it’s not easy to shift from hobby drones to commercial applications. Aerial robots consume a lot of power, limiting how long their missions can last — one reason he said that payload-carrying delivery drone efforts spearheaded by Amazon and Google haven’t yet taken off.
Navigating safely with full autonomy is also difficult, he said.
“Skydio has taken on this challenge of developing vision-only platforms in all kinds of conditions,“he said. “That’s really hard to do.“
DJI doesn’t yet offer such autonomy, but Kumar said it won’t easily be beaten. It was first to really capitalize on the consumer potential of drones and has built out a strong manufacturing and supply chain capacity.
“It’s amazing to me that we discriminate against DJI because we think that company can spy on us,“said Kumar. “Are they a national security threat? I don’t believe so. Are they innovative? Absolutely. Do they attract top talent? Absolutely. Some of my best students have gone to DJI.“