For some, best WiFi signal is in parking lot
As the sun set on a recent evening in Rutherfordton, N.C., author Beth Revis drove her green sport utility vehicle into the parking lot of a closed elementary school and connected to the building’s free WiFi. Then, for the third time since the coronavirus pandemic had taken hold, she taught a twohour writing class from her driver’s seat.
Revis, 38, held a flashlight to her face with one hand. In the other, she held a selfie stick with her smartphone attached, looking at the device to speak to her students.
Getting the internet in her area, about 70 miles west of Charlotte, had always been a headache, Revis said. “But during the pandemic,” she said, “it has turned from a mild inconvenience to a near impossibility.”
For Revis and many others across the country, parking lots have been a digital lifeline. Instead of
spending hours in restaurants, libraries and cafes, people without fast internet access at home are sitting in lots near schools, libraries and stores that have kept their signals on.
In Ohio, Lt. Gov Jon Husted has directed people to connect to hundreds of nonprofits, libraries and schools across the state. School leaders in Sacramento have encouraged families to use free hot spots in library and school parking lots, and more than 100 people logged on to the WiFi of libraries in Omaha, Neb., over three days recently.
Near Topeka, Kan., a steady flow of cars now arrive outside the public library, while other cars cluster near connected bookmobiles parked in lots near a women’s correctional facility and a mobile home park.
“I hope that there is a lesson learned from this,” said Gina Millsap, head of the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. “Broadband is like water and electricity now, and yet it’s still being treated like a luxury.”
The dependence on WiFi in parking lots shows the lengths to which people are going to combat the country’s digital divide, one of the most stubborn problems in technology — and one the coronavirus has exacerbated.
There are an estimated 1 in 4 Americans with no highspeed internet access at home, according to the Pew Research Center, either because it’s too expensive or because the home is in a rural area with limited service. Some use their smartphone data plans for highspeed access, but those plans are often insufficient. That makes it harder for many people to work from home during the health crisis and for their children to keep up with their schoolwork away from the classroom.
Federal lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, have pushed for legislation to make service more affordable, especially for families with schoolage children. But such legislative pushes have been tried before without success.
“What is disappointing is that we have done nothing for years to address the problem,” said
Mignon Clyburn, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission who has long pressed for more funding for rural broadband and subsidies for lowincome families. “Now we are in a crisis, and we are triaging.”
On federal internet service maps, Louis Derry appears to have broadband access, because few people in his area of upstate New York have high speeds, defined by the government as 25 megabits per second. But at his home, 7 miles from Cornell University, only a much slower speed is available from his provider — 5 megabits per second. It is not enough to support the needs of his family.
The family takes turns driving down to Brookton’s Market, a small country store with a gravel driveway, to park and connect to its free internet. Derry’s daughter, Ellie, a freshman at Colorado College, goes almost daily for her Zoom class sessions and to download big files that she can take home and work on offline. Other cars are almost always parked nearby, drivers typing away at their laptops and using the free WiFi. They often keep one empty spot between them, to follow social distancing guidelines.
In more urban areas, the problems are due to affordability. Mary Anne Mendoza, 26, a doctoral student at UC Irvine, shares the leastexpensive internet service available with her mother and sister in their twobedroom apartment near the college. When her mother, an MBA candidate, is on a videoconference call, and her sister is online for an undergraduate class, the WiFi at home slows to a crawl.
So Mendoza, who also teaches political science at Cal Poly Pomona, has been driving to the parking lot of a nearby Starbucks to get online.
“In my car, I get the privacy I need, and the quality of service is better,” she said.
Anna Haskins, a professor of sociology at Cornell, said she worries that relying on parking lots is inadequate for her students, who are taking classes remotely. One student, in St. Louis, dropped all electronic communication for two weeks until he was able to find a public WiFi hot spot. Another, in rural Oklahoma, is driving several miles a day to the nearest parking lot WiFi spot to take quizzes or do homework from her car.
“To leave the house and take a quiz in a car shows how hard this transition is for some,” Haskins said. “It’s hard to evaluate people fairly. Is their grade on a quiz low because they didn’t study or because they didn’t have the best situation to take the quiz?”