‘No longer a luxury’: As life moves online, the offline fall behind

When Amy Olsen wants to have a video chat with her family, she has to drive four miles to the parking lot of the Lowell, Vermont, town clerk to use the free Wi-Fi.

None of Lowell’s 879 or so residents have access to direct broadband service, according to BroadbandNow, a company that helps people find and compare internet service providers. The closest anyone there can get is “fixed wireless,” which uses outdoor directional antennas to broadcast radio signals to residential Wi-Fi gateways. But for that, you need to live close enough to an antenna. Ms. Olsen doesn’t.

Instead she uses a sluggish satellite connection, which is fine for sending email and downloading web pages, but not for much else. Video, she says, is “slow and bouncy.”

Ms. Olsen is far from alone. As endless social media feeds and YouTube videos emphasize that “We’re all in this together,” a huge swath of the population is finding itself digitally erased from the conversation. Some 42 million Americans, and a quarter of all rural residents, lack access to broadband, according to a February 2020 report from BroadbandNow. Even among those who live in places where broadband is offered, for many, it remains out of reach: Just 41% of households with incomes below $20,000 have broadband at home.