USA TODAY International Edition
Outbreak adds to Wi- Fi and broadband problems
Slow, spotty, stuttering Wi- Fi is the worst. I know because I spent the last month trying to work from my parents' house outside of Kenai, Alaska.
If it was sunny, and I turned their router off and on, stood on one foot in the highest point of the southeast corner of the living room, was the only person in the house online at that moment, and only trying to check email – well, then it was fine. Sometimes.
Add cloudy weather, another device or two, an actual comfy chair to work from, and someone trying to watch Netflix or Hulu? Fuhgetaboutit.
It turns out that of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Alaska has the slowest internet speed in America, according to internet testing firm Ookla, which conducted a speed test for PCMag. com in November 2019. That’s no surprise, given that it’s the Last Frontier and all.
What is a surprise though, is just how bad Wi- Fi and slow internet’s been across the map for so many of us during these pandemic times – no matter where we live. Normally, crummy connections are super frustrating – akin to robocalls during dinnertime. But when directly tied to our ability to work, learn, and communicate with the outside world, it's more than annoying.
“It’s so frustrating, work that should have taken me two hours took five or even seven,” 14- year old high school freshman Jordi Alford told me in Oakland, California, last week. Jordi, his younger brother Kiran, 10, and their parents left their urban home in midMarch to ride out COVID- 19 more remotely in their family’s cluster of cabins in the Sierra Foothills. Jordi's father is recovering from cancer and has COPD, which puts him at an increased risk of serious illness from COVID- 19.
“We were medically advised to leave town,” Jordi’s mom, Anki said. “And being out in the country was so much better for all of us for so many reasons – cleaner air, more access to outside activity – and only family around us. But not having access to reliable internet took its toll,” she added. “They would get through about three sentences of a Zoom lesson with their teacher, then get disconnected with the spinning wheel and have to wait 20, 30, 40 minutes. It was awful,” Anki said.
“There’s no Wi- Fi, so we got a Verizon Jetpack and an antenna to boost power,” fifth grader Kiran said. . “That gave us enough of a signal to go on for about five minutes at a time, but then it would stop, so we were just barely able to do a little tiny bit of work.”
As a result, the Alford family came back to Oakland to start the new school year with better Wi- Fi, but against doctor’s orders.
“The unfortunate truth is that millions of Americans working, going to school, and living in America’s heartland still don’t have access to highspeed broadband internet e- Connectivity,” USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue told USA TODAY. “In fact, of the 21 million Americans who lack high- speed broadband internet access, 80% are in rural areas and on tribal lands.”
Historically though, the United States government hasn’t been as proactive with high- speed internet. Instead of treating broadband as a public utility, they leave it up to the largely self- regulated internet industry to provide service. As a result, internet service providers ( ISPs) often don’t see these sparsely populated areas as profitable enough.
“That’s so infuriating,” says Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel – an outspoken advocate for more equal broadband access for everyone. “As a country, we’ve been told to go online for work, for school, for health care, and for so much more. And the challenge is that not everyone in this country can do that. To me, this is the cruelest part of the digital divide.”
Rosenworcel says the problem isn’t just for those living in the country. It hits city dwellers hard, too.
Some 100,000 students lack access to high- speed internet in Chicago. At least 112,000 residents have no wired internet services available at their New York addresses. And according to the nonprofit group Tech Exchange, one in every five San Francisco Bay Area residents don’t have an internet connection at home, even though they live in the shadows of some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, and Twitter – to name a few.
Even in areas of tremendous wealth, the digital divide is getting worse. In the hardscrabble neighborhood where I live in West Oakland for example, which is a ten minute BART ride away from the doorsteps of dozens of top tech companies, getting high- speed internet delivered to your home is expensive, and so is living here. A starter home sets you back a million dollars, and the average one- bedroom rental is around $ 3,000.
And this is just one example. Some 20 million people who do live within the reach of broadband service do not subscribe because they can’t afford to or the speeds they can get are not worth the cost. And about 4.5 million people in urban areas still can’t get access to broadband because of service inadequacies caused by geography or the vagaries of service- provider rollouts.
If it sounds like digital redlining, many advocates say, that’s because it is. Similar to residential redlining, this impacts races differently, too: Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to have a broadband connection at home, according to the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.
While many households in urban areas will be able to rely on donations of laptops and Wi- Fi hotspots thanks to some tech companies, many advocates worry it won’t be enough.
Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Awardwinning consumer tech contributor.