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There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the digital divide — people who don’t have access to high-speed internet. The technology was once a luxury, but it’s become as essential as running water and electricity for modern life. Education options from grade school to GED programs to grad school are online, as are job applications, access to social and medical services, and simple tasks like ordering from Amazon.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought home just how central the internet is now, when our world shut down and Zoom became a noun as well as a verb (as in, “Let’s have a Zoom,” or “My kid’s got Zoom school”).
So it’s even more surprising to see how many people still lack high-speed internet. In Mecklenburg County, 14% of households have no internet access at all and 7% can access it only via phone or dial-up speeds. That’s 21%, or just over 1 in 5, according to the Center for Digital Equity at Queens University.
As you might suspect, the pattern of which areas have the most households without high-speed internet mirrors Charlotte’s familiar “crescent and wedge” pattern, with low-income, mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods hardest hit.
But zoom out, and it becomes apparent that broadband internet access is as much — if not more — of a rural problem. Last month, the North Carolina Division of Broadband and Digital Equity released new data on the number of households and businesses that don’t have high-speed internet.
They found just 500,000 that are either unserved (with no access to even the minimum speeds necessary for functional broadband) or underserved (locations that technically have broadband, but at such anemic speeds you’d be hard-pressed to work remotely or stream a lecture for class).
As you can see, Mecklenburg County actually looks pretty good on this map, with hardly any red, while the rural regions west of us and in the eastern part of the state are a sea of red and orange.
So what’s happening here? A couple of things. First, the dynamics are different in terms of why people don’t have high-speed internet. Mecklenburg residents might have access to the internet (there are high-speed cables pretty much everywhere here) but not be able to afford it, while rural residents might lack access (there aren’t any cables laid near them) even if they can afford it.
Second, even “broadband” might not be enough speed these days. The minimum Federal Communications Commission definition for “broadband” internet is 25 mb/second download speed and 3 mb/second upload (25/3 mb/s). That’s right at the cusp of usability for a lot of modern internet-based applications.
Zoom, for example, recommends at least 3.8 mb/second of upload speeds for high-definition group video calls — which means even though they meet the federal threshold, anyone with speeds of 3 mb/second is going to struggle in, say, a college seminar or a work brainstorming session.
The statewide map highlights, in yellow, areas where there’s only the lower-speed 25/3 mb/s internet access available. Areas like these meet the FCC definition for having access to broadband, but residents there are likely to still struggle to use their internet for many day-to-day essentials.
Another data source, the FCC’s interactive broadband coverage map, highlights this dynamic. Almost 97% of residential units in Mecklenburg County have access to true high-speed internet (100 mb/s downloads and 20 mb/s uploads). More than half, 58%, have access to 1,000/100 mb/s speeds.
Fifty miles west, in Anson County, it’s a different story. There, 57% of residential units have access to true high-speed internet, and just 17% have access to 1,000/100 mb/s speeds. It’s a similar story across the state with urban and rural broadband access.
What’s the takeaway? I think there are three things we can learn:
- Don’t forget rural areas and small towns. As North Carolina’s center of gravity increasingly shifts toward big, urban counties and many rural ones shrink, it’s easy to just focus on urban crises and ignore rural areas. But all of the disparities and crises we focus on, whether it’s infant mortality or education or unemployment, there’s usually a rural version of it — and it’s often worse.
- Solutions look different depending on location. It’s easy to take a one-size-fits-all approach when thinking about solutions, but issues like the digital divide show how different approaches need to be depending on circumstances. Inlivian (formerly the Charlotte Housing Authority) recently received a $300,000 grant for low-income households to access high-speed internet. Those funds will go toward discounts of $30 per month for subscribers, and for laptops and other devices. The NC Rural Center last week announced a $1 million grant for 18 counties in western North Carolina, where they’ll focus on actually building the infrastructure and working with providers to lay “last mile” broadband connections for places that don’t have the actual cables. Apply that to just about any disparity — health care, education, jobs — and you’ll see similar dynamics in the need to ensure access and the need to build facilities that don’t exist.
- Changing metrics matter. By the older federal definition of "broadband" — 25/3 mb/s — we’re not doing so badly. But if you consider that is a barely functional speed for many uses, and that 100/20 mb/s is a more relevant baseline speed for broadband, we look much worse. Go even further, to top-of-the-line 1,000/100 mb/s speeds many businesses and high-bandwidth applications need, and the disparity is even more pronounced. While 64% of Wake County has access to those speeds, just 4% of Burke County does.
